My issue stems from the attitudes of the people we're doing it for. I started out doing it for humanity. To bring the bicycle for the mind to everyone.

Then one day I woke up and realized the ones paying me were also the ones using it to run over or do circles around everyone else not equipped with a bicycle yet; and were colluding to make crippled bicycles that'd never liberate the masses as much as they themselves had been previously liberated; bicycles designed to monitor, or to undermine their owner, or more disgustingly, their "licensee".

So I'm not doing it anymore. I'm not going to continue making deliberately crippled, overly complex, legally encumbered bicycles for the mind, purely intended as subjects for ARR extraction.

It's hard to find anything wrong with your conclusions except that you're leaving out the part where they're trying to automate our contributions to devalue our skills. I'm surprised there isn't a movement to halt the use of AI for certain tasks in software development on the same level as the active resistance from doctors against socialized medicine in the US. These expensive toys will inevitably introduce catastrophic level bugs and security vulnerabilities into critical infrastructure software. Right now, most of Microsoft's product offerings, like GitHub and Office, are critical infrastructure software.

> I'm surprised there isn't a movement to halt the use of AI for certain tasks in software development on the same level as the active resistance from doctors against socialized medicine in the US.

This is also shocking to me. Especially here on HN! Every tech CEO on earth is salivating over AI coding because they want it to devalue and/or replace their expensive human software developers. Whether or not that will actually happen, that's the purpose of building all of these "agentic" coding tools. And here we are, dumbass software engineers, cheerleading for and building the means of our own destruction! We downplay it with bullshit like "Oh, but AI is just a way to augment our work, it will never really replace us or lower our compensation!" Wild how excited we all are about this.

I think it's similar to a thread we had here recently about why it's impossible to unionize tech workers. Basically, most tech workers don't like other tech workers (or other people, really) very much, so there's very little camaraderie of the sort you need to get people to team up and take on a shared enemy. Instead, we all think we're smarter than the other guy, so he'll be the one who gets fired while I thrive in the new situation.

I think a lot of software engineers (especially those who post on HN) think of themselves as top-1% Captains Of Industry, who would never benefit from a union. "Unions only help those guys lower on the totem pole than me!" says every software engineer out there, so they disregard it as something that could help them. We all think we are Temporarily Embarrassed John Carmacks.

That doesn't explain why doctors that see themselves as top earners didn't have a problem banding together. Social organization doesn't require unions in socialist/communist sense. It can also be accomplished through other professional organizations like AMC.

> This is also shocking to me. Especially here on HN!

this website is owned and operated by a VC, who build fortunes off exploiting these people

"workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite!" is the last thing I'd expect to see here

HackerNews is driven by a particular kind of radical libertarian philosophy believing person. You don't come up with the sorts of pump and dump start up ideas that typically come out of Y Combinator without being either sociopathic or delusional in the above way.

Anybody who thinks this place represents the average working or middle class programmer hasn't been paying much attention. They fool a lot of people by being social liberal to go along with their economic liberalism.

HN is obviously not the right forum for the skill value dilution discussion but not seeing deep discussion about responsible LLM usage from developers or major software companies is really troubling. If Microsoft is stupid enough to dogfood their unrefined LLM based tools on critical software in the name of increased earnings and shareholder value, I'm sure the entire enterprise stack is hoping to do the same.

Because other professional fields have not been subjected to a long running effort to commoditize software engineers. And further, most other (cognitive) professionals are not subject to 'age shaming' and discounting of experience.

We should not forget that on the other side of this issue are equally smart and motivated people and they too are aware of the power dynamics involved. For example, the phenomena of younger programmers poo pooing experienced engineers was a completely new valuation paradigm pushed by interested parties at some point around the dotcom bubble.

Doctors with n years in the OR will not take shit from some intern that just came out of school. But we were placed in that situation at some point after '00. So the fundamental issue is that there is an (engineered imho) generational divide, and coupled with age discrimination in hiring (again due to interested parties' incentives) has a created a situation where one side is accumiliating generational wealth and power and the other side (us developers) are divided by age and the ones with the most skin in the game are naive youngsters who have no clue and have been taught to hate on "millenials" and "old timers" etc.

    > Because other professional fields have not been subjected to a long running effort to commoditize software engineers.

In the United States, aren't Nurse Practitioner and Physician Assistant a "direct assault" on medical doctors? I assume these roles were created in a pushback at the expense of medical doctors.

    > And further, most other (cognitive) professionals are not subject to 'age shaming' and discounting of experience.

I am of two minds about this comment. TL;DR: "Yeah, but..." One thing that I have noticed in my career: Most people can pump out much more code and work longer hours when they are young. Then, when they get a bit older and/or start a family (and usually want better work/life balance), they start to play the "experience" card, which rarely translates into higher realised economic productivity. Yes, most young devs write crap code, but they can write a lot of it. If you can find good young devs, they are way cheaper and faster than experience devs. I write that sentence with the controversial view that most businesses don't need amazing/perfect software; they just need "good enough" (which talented juniors can more than provide).

When young people learn that I am a software developer, their eyes light up (thinking that I make huge money working for FAANG). Frequently, they ask if they should also become a software developer. I tell them no, because this industry requires constant self-learning that is very hard to sustain after 40. Then, you become a target for layoffs, and getting re-employed after 40 as a software dev can be very tough.

> These expensive toys will inevitably introduce catastrophic level bugs and security vulnerabilities into critical infrastructure software. Right now, most of Microsoft's product offerings, like GitHub and Office, are critical infrastructure software.

So nothing new? Just this/last month, it seems like the multi-select "open/close" button in the GitHub PR UI was just straight up broken. No one seemed to have noticed until I opened a bug report, and it continued being broken for weeks before they finally fixed it. Not the first time I encounter this on Microsoft properties, they seem to constantly push out broken shit, and no one seem to even notice until some sad user (like me) happens to stumble across it.

Have you considered contributing to the Free Software Movement?

I am speculating that this "AI Revolution" may lead to some revitalization of the movement as it would allow individual contributors the ability to compete on the same levels as proprietary software providers who previously had to employ legions of developers to create their software.

Considered but that'll probably only happen once I've alternative sources of income lined up that doesn't shackle my IP contributions off hours to my employers, which means bringing in enough to get a couple hours with an attorney that knows what they are doing. I am not one. I have merely read some books on it.

But what's the business model? Why would I pay for support and/or development on an open source project if I can just run it through and LLM?

What are you doing now instead?

I started coding at a young age, but entered the professional world in 2012, just like you. I feel the same. I just can't come to grips with the fact that the goal is not to write good software anymore, but to get something, anything out the door on which we can then sell by marketing it based on stuff it doesn't do yet (but it will, we promise!) so that we can make more money and fake making something "new" again (putting a textbox and a button, and hooking it up to an LLM api). Software is nowadays assumed to not work properly. And we're not allowed to fix it anymore!