AI is rapidly eroding any joy or satisfaction I once derived from my development job. It’s being pushed hard despite its many problems and limitations, and I’m pretty sure they’ll eventually be considering your AI leverage when determining raises, layoffs, etc. I know better than to voice my concerns about it, I’ve been around long enough to know when the company has its mind made up about something and expects everyone to get on board or get out of the way.

I don’t know where to go to escape it, though. Every company seems to be going all-in on AI and I’m not sure what else I could do with my education and skill set. And it’s not like my family can afford for me to take a pay cut in the current economy.

I’m convinced that the way we use AI and the way it is marketed by corporations will force us to recognize the fundamental divide between people who genuinely care for human progress and building a better tomorrow and those who either don’t care at all or have a very warped and egocentric view of progress. I’m glad that what is described in this blog post hasn’t reached my day job yet, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not worried that it’s only a matter of time. It’s difficult to not feel extremely disillusioned by the current state of the world.

I’m also quitting or rather retiring this year. a couple years ago I pivoted from being a contract/consultant dev to doing consultation work to clean up AI slop that various companies produced.

I had hoped that eventually my clients would get it, would realize that utilizing LLMs for end to end builds and vibe coding your way to a final product didn’t work but…no…they aren’t getting it. They refuse to acknowledge it.

I’m tired. I’m tired of the same song and dance with every client “hey this app we made isn’t scaling and there’s a lot of issues with it, can you run a code review and tell is where we went wrong?” “sure you used AI to build this from end to end via a vibe coder who doesn’t know any of the languages the AI used. you need to start over with actual real devs” and nope. they just find another vibe coder that they feel can write better prompts.

So I’m quitting. I can’t do it anymore. I was hoping this bubble would have burst by now but the way, especially recently, companies are fighting tooth and nail to keep these shit producing agents going because they’re way too invested now is worrying. IF this bubble bursts it’s going to take EVERYONE with it. Everyone. so I’m getting out now and hope my money is still worth something when it does burst.

This one hit me hard. It described a lot of what I’ve been feeling myself lately.

Thanks for sharing this. I’m also quitting. I’m exhausted. My great pride has been rubbed from me. The morale code of this society has been turned upside down, and I do not wish to keep contributing.

I went to free gardening classes at the local library. I spent more time with friends. I am grateful that I have some savings to recover.

I feil this one. I had co-workers that used the office picture of another one to give it to chatgpt to change it to a specific style. I was feeling so weird about this… it’s hard to explain, like I was revulsed by this

2 degrees, 15 years of experience, senior level title and now I’m unemployed. I’ve never wanted to own a farm so badly in my life, but even the agriculture industry is a nightmare (Monsanto). I’m just applying weekly in hopes to secure a job that will probably be gone in less than 3 years.

fired two months ago for bombing out of a PIP* and I feel so incredibly seen by this article. all my motivation and passion for making the linux and the kubernetes and the cloud things has evaporated and I have no fucking idea what to do next, thankfully I can also take some time off and I’m leaning into music as well, kinda in a cover band and likely joining another cover band.

*a PIP that my shithead of a former manager put me on the literal instant I returned to work from a double-whammy bereavement leave of first my grandpa dying, and then having to euthanize our beloved 12 year old dog. and the PIP’s core requirement turned out to be technically impossible anyways, and yet here I am

I know I’m in the minority here, but I don’t blame AI for the conditions he’s describing at all. I’m a little jealous that as an older millennial, he got to experience the golden years of tech work where everyone was getting rich off work marketed as meaningful and socially progressive. Us younger folks that got into tech because of that era are kicking ourselves for not being born a decade or two earlier.

As a gen z-er, I’ve only experienced exploitation. Skeleton crews where you are saddled with way too much work at all times, and your seniors have no time to train you to do it properly, so you bury yourself in a cycle of burn out and tech debt. Oh, and our starting wages have likely not increased since OP graduated college. So my perspective is that work for large corporations is a joke, and no one actually cares about the output beyond how much money they can extract out of shittier (i.e., cheaper) work. This enshittification of the workplace is why people are using AI first and asking questions never. I don’t blame them. I’m using copilot for side projects and it’s 10x faster at coding than I am, although I agree with OP, the code can be sloppy and should absolutely require human supervision.

I think what he hasn’t quite arrived at as the logical conclusion of his laments is that tech workers need to unionize. It sucks because I do think people of his generation who benefited most from the tech boom would never consider that they would benefit from class consciousness (a lot of them aren’t just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, they are actually ashamed millionaires). But yeah, if he wants privacy protections in the workplace to be taken seriously, if he wants assurance that AI will not literally take his job because it was trained to do just that by his company, if he wants to find meaning in human connection, he’s looking for a union.

Exactly what I’m feeling… I don’t know of any companies that aren’t drinking the koolaid. My friend recently got laid off. He suspects it was because it was constantly pushing back on AI slop from other engineers.

I’ve been skipping the AI questions on recent company surveys… a few days ago, my manager directly asked me for “my thoughts on AI” during our 1:1… kinda freaked me out… I didn’t say anything bad about AI, but I also wasn’t gushing over how much I love AI (I hate AI)… I feel like they’re watching me a little more closely now… I’m going to start answering that I love AI on our surveys now… 😢

I don’t feel like they genuinely care about discovering if AI works. The AI questions are usually like: “Do you like AI?” and the answers are like “A: Yes”, “B: FUCK YES”, or “C: omg please more AI!”

I keep having impulses to quit my job, find an old lathe and milling machine, and just do metalworking things and brew beer until I retire. The siren song beckons.

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