Such a brilliant video. I’m in the middle of the very identity crisis he’s talking about.
I was laid off by a company that wanted to go full AI last year. I had been working there for 6.5 years. Constantly getting stellar performance reviews.
I have been in the software industry for 30 years, programming for 40. I have a bachelors in Computer Science. And now, probably because of my age, I cannot find a job.
Some of the things I have noticed is that AI has been one of the most aggressively pushed technologies I’ve ever seen in the industry. Pushed by executives who don’t code. Pushed under the guise of improved productivity. Where productivity was never really an issue. They just wanted things to be done faster. With no real measurable benefit to this increased speed and all of the risk.
Another noticeable thing is that accountability still remains with the developer but not the praise. Errors are pushed on to the developers inability to prompt the model correctly while achievements are a result of the “amazing AI”. There is no incentive nor avenue for developers to be innovative anymore. The model will produce the same bland “solutions” over and over again.
I’m not saying that the tool isn’t useful, just that the people with the least technical ability (execs) have been mandating AI the most. What if the woodworker’s boss mandated a specific kind of tool that made difficult to find errors sometimes. Would people buy into it?
Anyway, I’m tired boss. I had built my identity on being a programmer and these days I’m thinking of maybe getting into creating (non-AI) art or sculpture.
>Where productivity was never really an issue. They just wanted things to be done faster.
I'm not sure it was ever really about getting things done faster. Like ever other management "optimization", the AI revolutions was about cost savings. Replace humans costing a couple hundred thousand a year (salary + benefits) with AI costing a few dollars a month. Then, a year or so later, the cost ballooned and the savings was negligible, if at all.
Yeah, I'd caution against taking experience of even 1 year old in this field. In a year, models both shrink and improve performance at the same time. At least in local AI space, the best we got going last July was something like gpt-oss-120b and you couldn't do anything real with it. Today, you run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next at the same computer and it's amazingly good.
In my experience, AI is better at disproving hypothesis and hunting bugs than it is at coming up with valid solutions and implementing them. I think the scientific approach of producing testable hypothesis which are invalidated and then converted into verifiable fact works the best. It can read your code and point out the ways it fails, and it can write tests that prove existence of a bug and when it has these tests, then it can also prove that the solution bites. AI can write code, but it is even better at reading code, in my experience. Possibly the closed AIs are much better than the things I can run on a computer myself, but at least so far, the tests indicate that they are only a few months ahead, in practice. They are big and good, no doubt, but they are not mine, and I don't like depending on what I can't run myself.
In my experience, AI is better at disproving hypothesis and hunting bugs than it is at coming up with valid solutions and implementing them.
Exactly the same here. It's weird because hardly anyone else seems to have this experience. I think I actually lose time correcting an AI's mistakes than if just wrote the code myself, but AI always finds my mistakes and I reckon I save a lot of time overall not getting bitten by them later.
334
u/One_Economist_3761 2d ago
Such a brilliant video. I’m in the middle of the very identity crisis he’s talking about.
I was laid off by a company that wanted to go full AI last year. I had been working there for 6.5 years. Constantly getting stellar performance reviews.
I have been in the software industry for 30 years, programming for 40. I have a bachelors in Computer Science. And now, probably because of my age, I cannot find a job.
Some of the things I have noticed is that AI has been one of the most aggressively pushed technologies I’ve ever seen in the industry. Pushed by executives who don’t code. Pushed under the guise of improved productivity. Where productivity was never really an issue. They just wanted things to be done faster. With no real measurable benefit to this increased speed and all of the risk.
Another noticeable thing is that accountability still remains with the developer but not the praise. Errors are pushed on to the developers inability to prompt the model correctly while achievements are a result of the “amazing AI”. There is no incentive nor avenue for developers to be innovative anymore. The model will produce the same bland “solutions” over and over again.
I’m not saying that the tool isn’t useful, just that the people with the least technical ability (execs) have been mandating AI the most. What if the woodworker’s boss mandated a specific kind of tool that made difficult to find errors sometimes. Would people buy into it?
Anyway, I’m tired boss. I had built my identity on being a programmer and these days I’m thinking of maybe getting into creating (non-AI) art or sculpture.