[simonw]

I suggest leaning into the joy a little.

I know a lot of people - serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them - who are having the time of their lives right now.

I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them.

All those side project ideas from the past few decades have suddenly become much more feasible. There's so much new to explore and build.

We get to reinvent how software is written. The field is wide open - anyone can be the first to find a new pattern that works, or figure out a new way to apply this tech to real world problems.

There are a thousand reasons to be negative about the implications of this technology, and many of them are legitimate. Don't let that distract you entirely from the parts of this that are genuinely inspiring, enabling and fun.

[SirensOfTitan]

You might absolutely be correct, but there is a bias within our field to overly focus on the technology at the expense of everything else.

You are speaking about well-off engineers as a fairly famous top 1% engineer. You need to consider your own bias here. What aren't you seeing?

I think labor organization is absolutely vital now, and it can certainly mix favorably with techno-optimism, but it is silly for us as an industry to sit back and let our jobs be forever changed without a seat at the table. It is silly to ignore the ways in which this technology could negatively change the median knowledge worker's ability to survive and thrive.

[simonw]

I emphasized the career status of the people I'm describing here precisely because it's important to acknowledge how different perspectives are affected by privilege in this kind of conversation.

[pibaker]

In practice this sounds exactly like when organizations go "we are located on the traditional land of X people" and then do absolutely nothing about, say, the X people who are still around and living in poverty.

It feels like something you acknowledge to alleviate your own sense of guilt. Not something others would find useful.

[simonw]

I honestly don't feel particularly guilty here. I'm trying to help other people find beneficial ways to use this stuff, I feel good about doing that.

[Henchman21]

So what's the aggregate perspective of the 99%? You've described the 1% well, but that's only... well to be honest it is probably quite a bit less than 1% of all humans.

Any thoughts? What do you think the average work-a-day Joe thinks about all this?

[simonw]

I'd love to know that. Anecdotally plenty of regular people love it and plenty more hate it.

Have you seen a study on this that you find credible?

[logicprog]

This seems like a very credible, thorough, and telling survey from Pew on what average people think about AI: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-p...

Key findings (to me):

- Way more people think AI will have a negative effect on the US over the next 20 years than think it will have a positive effect (35% vs 17%)

- Even more people think increased usage of AI will personally harm them than benefit them (43% vs 24%)

- Women and men have a huge gap on this: 53% of men say increased use of AI makes them feel more excited than concerned, versus 30% of women (probably due to deepfakes, but also likely due to women being more likely to be progressive, and the big anti-AI memes going around progressive spaces).

- 64% of people think AI will net eliminate jobs over the next 20 years versus just 14% that think it will even just not make much of a difference

It's also worth noting that AI experts were wildly out of touch with those attitudes compared to the general population.

[simonw]

Thanks, that study is really useful.

It does however suffer from the (maybe insurmountable?) problem that "AI" is an extremely vague term with many potential interpretations.

I expect the "AI experts" in that study may have had a different definition in mind than the general public.

I remain much more skeptical about the impact of AI image/video/audio generation on society than I do LLMs, but LLMs themselves have such a wide array of potential uses that their impact will vary wildly depending on what they're being used for.

[justonepost2]

> serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them

> I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them.

> side project ideas from the past few decades

This joy seems to apply to a lot of people who don't need to worry about silly unimportant things like money anymore.

[simonw]

Yes, it does. It's a lot easier not to be scared of the impact this stuff could have on your career if you are already financially secure.

(I'm still personally optimistic that software engineering careers will have a bright future, for what that's worth.)

[bigtex88]

How do you expect this plays out when 99% of people have no money and no hope? Do you think they'll just sit back and take it?

[cstoner]

My friend once told me an analogy about modern software engineering that went something along the lines of the following.

There are piles of money just sitting around waiting for someone to pick them up. Unfortunately it's really hard to do because the piles are scattered around and hard for any one person to pick up.

So the best way to coordinate picking up all of these piles of money is to figure out how to convince a bunch of people with autism spectrum disorder to program machines to do it for you.

In this analogy you can get rich by doing one of a few jobs:

* Finding the piles of money (sales)

* Coding robots to pick up the piles of money (engineering)

* Coordinating the above two in come capacity (management)

AI certainly makes it less lucrative to pick up some of these piles because there will be more people picking them up. But will probably also be the case that it will let us pick up piles of money we didn't even know existed before. Or ones that we knew about but were hidden deep inside of sprawling caves that were intractable to search before.

If it turns out that we don't need any coordination to pick up these piles any more, then pretty much everyone is out of a job. Not just software engineers, but pretty much every white collar job. Once that's done it'll only be a matter of time before they can automate away the blue collar jobs, too.

I guess I'm just skeptical that we'll actually automate away all of the white collar jobs.

[coffeebeqn]

I have been using the tools for the last 3 years and I don’t find them joyful. I’m a craftsman at heart and managing agents sounds like an even worse proposal than managing people

[simonw]

The people I know who are having the most fun with this stuff do tend to have had engineering management or other people managing experience in the past.

It's a great deal easier than managing people! Agents don't have ambitions and fears and opinions and egos to take into account.

[cal_dent]

Doesn't this imply a quite insular, and somewhat anti human (if you allow me to be a bit flowery) future? I get other people can be annoying but that's part of us as a species. All of us now just working in our little silo with all our llm tools doesn't seem like a lot of fun long term

[simonw]

Just because you are working with a team of coding agents doesn't mean you don't also get to work with other humans as well.

What's changed is the scope of ambition of the projects you can take on with that team.

Think about a project that a team of 3 could have taken on together in 2022. I expect that many projects of that scale could be handled in 2025 by a single expert coding agent enhanced engineer.

So now we get to ask ourselves what a team of 3 coding agent enhanced engineers working together can take on instead!

I've always been frustrated at how long it takes to build interesting software. Part of the joy for me right now is rediscovering how large a project an individual or a small team can take on.

[logicprog]

Sounds like great fun to me

— resident admitted anti-human

[GeoAtreides]

I tried leaning into the joy, took about 10 seconds before I remembered I don't have any discretionary spending, that the job market is crashing, that I don't own a house, and the AI is destroying the very industry I trained on since I was eleven, taking my means of surviving away. And no personal project will save us, because everything will drown in a deluge of vibeslop that devalues any kind of work and knowledge.

Tell me Simon, what happens with the economy when no one affords more than barely survival? To whom are we going to sell those side projects? To the 1% with their soon to crash stocks? To the disappearing white collars? To the proles that only spend on food, alcohol and gambling?

Is that where the joy is? In seeing the hope fading away? In our stolen future? Tell me, so I too can be joyful like you.

[simonw]

> Tell me Simon, what happens with the economy when no one affords more than barely survival?

Everything is awful for almost everyone. I expect even the ultra wealthy will find their lives significantly less pleasant than they were before.

I hope that doesn't happen. That's why I don't write much about "AGI" - I'm unexcited about the concept, at least until someone can convincingly explain how the economy doesn't collapse for regular humans as a result.

I maintain my joy partly by not believing the AGI hype. I refer to that as the science fiction version of AI. I don't think that's what we have today.

We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.

[GeoAtreides]

great sleight of hand there, making it all about AGI when it wasn't about AGI at all

[simonw]

I categorize "nobody has a job any more" as part of the AGI conversation, especially since one of the more common AGI definitions floating around is OpenAI's "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" from https://openai.com/charter/

So I don't buy your "sleight of hand" criticism here. If you ignore the fact that I used the acronym AGI what did you think of my response?

[GeoAtreides]

If I ignore the AGI parts, there's only:

>Everything is awful for almost everyone. I expect even the ultra wealthy will find their lives significantly less pleasant than they were before.

>We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.

I think you refuse to extrapolate the obvious consequences and have forgotten (if you ever knew) how it's like to be in trenches. You put on the horse blinders of 'easy to build' on the left and 'so much fun' on the right and happily trot on, while the wolves of white collar job automation are closing in for the middle class. You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant. You think people will care about the sideslop everyone will build, not seeing that 'everyone will build' means 'no one will care'. Worse, means no one will buy (knowledge| skill|creation).

Indeed we have not tipped over into the abyss, but we're teetering and the wind is picking up. It's not the end times, it's not AGI, it doesn't have to be AGI to wreck great damage on the economy, our craft and, ultimately, our way of life and our minds.

And the wind is picking up, faster and faster.

[simonw]

> You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant

I hope that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, and that people who think software engineers will all become redundant will be proved very wrong.

I'm trying to use what little influence I have to push things in that direction by ensuring software engineers have the knowledge and tools they need to become cyborg centaurs.

There is a very real chance that you're right, and that the way LLMs are going will massively disrupt the lives of software engineers in a very bad way.

I don't think that's a foregone conclusion yet, and I'm continuing to hope (and in my own tiny way push) for a better path.

[logicprog]

> ...the wolves of white collar job automation are closing in for the middle class. You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant.

I think he doesn't think it's possible to actually make white collar workers redundant because we don't have AGI, since AGI is precisely defined as that — continually deferred, likely impossible for current technology — end goal that we know we haven't achieved yet.

And FWIW, I think he's right. The fact that LLMs are inherently stochastic, cannot reason or plan sufficiently by themselves, and do not have a world model, means that you will always need humans in the loop not just to oversee, verify, and act as an accountability sink (which by itself could be pretty bad), but also to break problems down, plan, and architecture for them, and, when possible, design automated verifiability systems so that the LLM can act as the core of a cybernetic feedback loop, like a sort of linear genetic programming algorithm (which is what a Ralph loop does, incidentally). This last especially, this act of figuring out how to, either by hand or in a very tight supervised loop with an LLM that relies heavily on human expertise and judgement, specify the desired behaviors in a machine-verifiable way, looks a lot like just a higher level of programming to me. It's just red-green BDD.

> . You think people will care about the sideslop everyone will build, not seeing that 'everyone will build' means 'no one will care'. Worse, means no one will buy (knowledge| skill|creation).

I think this is again assuming AGI, where AI slop sort of reaches and becomes indistinguishable from the designs of people with good taste, architectural knowledge, experience, and care for the craft of actually making good, reliable things — but we're not there yet, and as I said above, I don't know that we'd ever get there. So yes, everyone will be able to make things, but not all of it will be of the same quality even if they're all using AI to do it! See, for example, the kind of thing you get if you put an agent in a Ralph loop to make a terminal emulator, versus what Mitchell Hashimoto is able to do using AI on GhostTTY.