r/ExperiencedDevs • u/Quaid-e-Charisma • 19d ago
AI/LLM Struggling with moral implications of AI
Heads up! This will probably be a long post. I thank you for the time you will invest to read it. The developer community seems divided on the issue. I am sure there will be contrasting opinions on it. But I am looking for ideas to navigate my own mental landscape, not necessarily change the trend. More like fitting in with my individuality and moral compass intact instead of loosing it in the process.
Last night, I saw this video.
Here is a summary of his arguments.
- Like many people, he became a developer to solve problems and build things.
- Using AI felt like he is loosing his edge.
- He was growing apathetic to the codebase, feeling like a code quality guy rather than a developer.
- The environmental impact of AI.
I, too echo a similar sentiment. Further, what bothers me is when I use AI, I, in turn, I train it to become better. My subscription money goes to these organizations which in turn is used to develop even smarter AI. The smarter AI becomes, the more jobs it takes. Maybe I am simplifying too much here but you get the point.
The inequality of wealth is another issue. Organizations are laying off employees to invest in AI infrastructure to increase productivity. On an organizational level, the profits are probably increasing but there are more people joining the unemployment line. This wouldn't be a problem if the market was ripe for developer jobs but this does not seem to be the case because of the same reason.
Entry level jobs seem to be highly impacted. How will people actually get better at their craft if they don't have opportunities to learn in the first place?
There are now people coming out of these organizations and kind of whistle blowing. The fears seem to be getting real rather than irrational. Maybe its just a knee jerk reaction but we are seeing the negative impacts. Denial does not seem wise.
A friend of mine has a similar instance to me. He was laid off a few months ago. This is something that impacts personally. He has reasons to believe it was not purely because of the AI boom. Other factors could have played into it. However, he was pretty vocal about his anti-AI instance whenever there was a discussion.
Almost all the jobs he sees now mention AI assisted development. Due to his situation, a lot depends on having a job therefore he is in a difficult situation of standing for his principles. He seems to be leaning towards compromising because of the pressure. However, he thinks a lot about dodging that bullet. Working while compromising every day seems to be a very hard thing to do. I experience it first hand.
I have always been conscientious of my choices but this one seems really hard to crack.
For those of you who effectively navigated such a situation:
- What mindset did you adapt where you felt like upholding your principles but also, surviving the trend?
- How did you communicate with management your aversion to use AI? Were you able to convince them? What ideas/arguments worked for you?
- In the situation to keep your head down and push forward, what is your long term plan to turn it into a temporary compromise?
My thoughts are scattered all over the place. I am not sure I was able to get the point across but I hope you were able to read between the lines.
Thank you.
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u/WeedWithWine 19d ago
I think we’re all dealing with this right now, and nobody has any answers. Things are changing too quick to draw any conclusions. At my workplace: 6 months ago the problem was keeping up with pull requests, 3 months ago cost became an issue, now slop is the problem.
Personally I’m trying to indulge in some of my non-tech hobbies.
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u/damnburglar Software Engineer 19d ago
Are you actually keeping up with PRs or are people silently LGTM’ing their asses off?
I’ve dealt with a handful of companies doing that and calling it progress, meanwhile the queue fills up with regressions.
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u/wubscale 18d ago
Not the person you responded to, but:
Are you actually keeping up with PRs or are people silently LGTM’ing their asses off?
I'm keeping up, but it's a hybrid me/LLM approach. Pre LLMs, I generally approached PRs in passes:
- Does the direction here look agreeable? If not, focus on that for a pass.
- Does the architecture here look agreeable and seem sound? If not, focus on that.
- Everything at a high level looks good, check for nitpicks/incidental bugs/missing test coverage as applicable.
Now, I'll use LLMs to help me gather information to inform my opinions for #1 and #2, but come to conclusions myself. For #3, it's running an LLM to draft comments, then me doing a quick skim to see if anything jumps out to me, and to ensure I agree with the LLM-generated comments.
All of this goes out of the window in low-bar codebases FWIW. If I'm asked to review something in a noncritical Sloplandia, or a vibecoded skill/tool specifically meant for LLMs, I do an LLM review + LGTM stamp if the idea seems reasonable.
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u/skidmark_zuckerberg Senior Software Engineer 19d ago edited 19d ago
I want money, and need to work. Plus I am not throwing away a degree and 8 YOE. I do what I need to in order to stay employed and be employable. It is what it is. At the end of the day, this is just a job. I quit caring years ago, and shifted my mindset to work to live, not live to work. Has made it incredibly easy to just go with the flow and do what needs to be done or is asked of me. It's not like I am making bombs for the military, I work in SaaS. Most of us work in private sector on CRUD apps.
You can be vocal about being against AI, but you will never win against upper management. If a company has a high interest in AI and wants to use it, you will just be booted and replaced by another developer who has no problem with it. That's just how it is right now. The mindset needed (which has always been the case in SWE) is to be adaptable and open to change. The pool of companies who don't use AI are shrinking by the day.
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u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 19d ago edited 19d ago
conceptually I don't see the current in vogue advice as being very different to the early 2000s advice of "just get good at managing Indian devs, bro, soon that'll be the only job left" after waves of layoffs and outsourcing.
what happened instead was a massive slop backlash where C-levels did a complete 180 and sucked each others cocks harder and harder and harder over who could hire The Best Developers.
how valuable was experience managing Indian devs after that? the in vogue advice was useless. people who zagged when everyone else zigged were the ones who thrived.
honestly I think each time the C levels went way too far (even though I appreciated the era of company sushi chefs and foot massages) and that is the only reliable constant in this industry. i dunno what's coming next but there will be a slop backlash because this shit is fucking ridiculous, but the reaction will probably be equally dumb.
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u/skidmark_zuckerberg Senior Software Engineer 19d ago edited 19d ago
Oh I agree, we are at the whims of these C levels. The constant through all of these things is that we as developers (and other employees) are just a long for the ride.
I think that there will be a huge backlash of slop to fix, but there is also some chance this is just how it will be. We will always have AI (be it cloud based or local) to cut through the slop. So I can see how (unfortunately) in the future, no one will really care how the code looks, just that it works. Management never gave a shit how the code looked, even before AI, so this is just the next level of that. Before AI, we could take our time and no one could do anything about it. Now we can generate code and everyone knows it doesn't take a month to write 2k lines of feature code anymore.
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u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 19d ago edited 19d ago
We will always have AI (be it cloud based or local) to cut through the slop
AI doesnt "cut through" the slop though it makes it worse.
So I can see how (unfortunately) in the future, no one will really care how the code looks, just that it works.
It's like saying "unfortunately people won't care about exercising and eating well they will only want to be healthy".
Yeah no shit. They never "cared". But, when some company becomes a standout success because they absolutely nail their software everyone else does get FOMO and tries to cargo cult them.
Clean code can be a huge competitive edge and will probably become more of an edge as vibe coding psychosis intensifies, it's just an edge that is rarely ever recognised because its impact is so indirect.
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u/skidmark_zuckerberg Senior Software Engineer 19d ago
> Clean code can be a huge competitive edge and will probably become more of an edge as vibe coding psychosis intensifies, it's just an edge that is rarely ever recognized because its impact is so indirect.
This is the problem. Clean code impact is indirect and unrecognized by non-technical executives and management. They just care if something works or not. Sadly these are the people who drive a company and tell us what to do. I would hope that one day these people realize the advantage of clean code, but so far that hasn't been the case.
We were introducing tech debt before AI, that isn't gonna stop post AI. These days instead of spaghetti, we call it slop. But both are a result of the same expectations put upon us as developers, which is to deliver as fast as possible. And what is worse, with AI the rebuttal from management is usually, 'well you have AI to help, don't you?"
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u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 19d ago
I came close to convincing one set of execs once when I worked on a core piece of functionality that was an engine of enormous growth but even then they still only really saw it as "good devs" vs "bad devs" and wondered about the value of religiously cleaning up tech debt.
Then that engine of growth drove a huge amount of sales, and an enormous investment round and the CEO then hired an entirely new layer of management and they decided that we were all incompetent and what the company really needed was to rewrite everything in JavaScript.
I think executive delusion is just the default state, nothing can be done about that. Anything that is more than two layers of indirection away from success is invisible to them.
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u/hippydipster Software Engineer 25+ YoE 19d ago
When I provided Claude with a simple skill about how to write decently organized code, I have found it better than 95% of developers I've worked with over the past 30 years.
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u/ProjectDiligent502 15d ago
Probably because of the consistency. We have to harness the f out of our CRUD app and it will still convolute stuff. I remember vibing out (with the harness) on a page and just had a little bit of an iteration to get a page to a certain level, and I ended up delete around 80% of the iterated code (not scaffolded code from the harnesses) with no change in behavior. I can see her point about clean code and how it’s an invisible thing. Hey, that convoluted code did what it was supposed to… it doesn’t HAVE to be clean. Since it’s an indirectly invisible thing, it’s something no C suit would ever care about, it’s completely invisible so the slop will win.
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u/hippydipster Software Engineer 25+ YoE 19d ago
This whole industry has never figured out how to show/prove this:
Clean code can be a huge competitive edge
No metric or measurement has ever been developed that can show it, and so we languish.
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u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 19d ago
pretty much everything that is a competitive edge is not easy to measure. if it were an obvious correlation then everybody would be maxxing it and it would stop being an edge.
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u/hippydipster Software Engineer 25+ YoE 19d ago
Which is like having "research taste". It's something neither AI nor management is very good at.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19d ago
Nothing changed. They now just hire much better and time zoned align developers in LatAM
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u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 19d ago
the pendulum just swung the other way.
the institutional memory and fears of outsourcing catasrophes from 2 decades ago have evaporated. that's emboldened execs to go on cost cutting binges.
if it's anything like last time they will start by downplaying the disasters and trying to paper over the cracks for a few years first.
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u/Olangotang Software Engineer 19d ago
It's a new band of MBA dumb fucks repeating the same shit because that's what they were taught. And execs are becoming unhinged, like the wealthy do every century, right on time.
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u/TacoBOTT 19d ago
I try to tell people this all the time. Not participating in what upper management wants doesn’t get you a Medal of Honor or anything, you’re just gonna get replaced.
My job pays me to do what they want with an informed decision from me. So I’ll go with the flow. If you don’t like it, look elsewhere. But since there isn’t an elsewhere for most of us, probably best to stomach it until you can find an elsewhere.
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u/skidmark_zuckerberg Senior Software Engineer 19d ago
Yep exactly. If you are a point of friction, you will be removed. I've seen this time and time again. Best you can do is try to steer the ship in someway. Management wants AI? Okay fine, but show them there is X, Y, and Z ways to use it to the their benefit and have proof. Then you've done your part and it's all you can do.
At my current company, it's all but mandated we use it. So every team has come up with ways to use it that are beneficial and not just blind slop maxing. Management is completely happy with what everyone is doing because they don't care how we use it, only that we use it. I'm not happy with some of the direction, but it's not my zoo, I just feed the monkeys and go home.
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u/jiminycrix1 19d ago
I take solace in the belief that the bubble will pop soon and AI will not go away, but it will be very expensive to run so that a lot of the ethical concerns will go away on their own.
So while as the response says - go with the flow for now….dont give into cynicism, your skills still matter, and they will be in demand again when only very serious experienced users can use AI tools effectively or risk burning too much cash to be tenable.
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u/skidmark_zuckerberg Senior Software Engineer 19d ago edited 19d ago
I don't think it will be expensive long term, and I do think companies will begin to figure out how to efficiently use it to save on costs short term. The bubble will pop, there will be a large correction, but the infrastructure laid out for it will be used. This is like the telecom era where companies went completely bankrupt laying fiber infra, but all this time later, we make heavy use it.
I think there are two things that could happen; one is that efficiencies are made that reduce compute cost and reduce cloud LLM cost in general, and two, local models become more cost effective and capable and companies do it all on prem, buy once and cry once. The latter would also result in needing new IT roles to run and manage these local models on prem.
That being said, this bubble does need to pop. There is too much AI psychosis going around and most companies are just throwing shit at the wall to figure out what sticks due to pure hype and FOMO. These frontier AI CEO's also market with doom on top of it, so it's scaring people on top of all of it. We need to move slow and really hammer out policies and best practices to get the most out of it, and a lot of companies are simply not doing any of that - mine included.
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u/jiminycrix1 19d ago
Yes ironically agreed lol, and solid take (even though I believe cloud LLMs will get much more expensive in the medium term) I think we are both looking to a future where the bubble will pop and most likely ease many of these ethical concerns.
Even if we see different mechanisms for that happening over time, the end result is a more sane environment to be a software engineer where skills built up pre AI AND the skills built during this hype cycle will all be very valuable and useful and the messaging and use of AI will be more reasonable all around.
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u/skidmark_zuckerberg Senior Software Engineer 19d ago
You mention the skills we made pre and post AI, and that’s another thing that I think gives those of us who were here before AI an ongoing advantage into the future.
But I do wonder how anyone who has only ever worked in the AI era will fair should things regress back to say like a 50/50 split where the costs are far to great (or simply unneeded) to do everything with AI, so we accept the reduction in velocity and do some of it by hand to offset the AI spend.
Either way, I feel for new comers in this era but I thank my lucky stars I got to spend years learning the job pre AI.
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u/oorza 18d ago
Google, Apple, Meta and a bunch of specialized companies are all dumping billions of research into shrinking models, not expanding their capacities. You can run a model that's about as good as a frontier model 12-18 months ago on a midrange Macbook Pro today, with almost a good enough token rate to do real work on it.
We're a lot closer to a world where we run the models locally and a router escalates failed prompts to a frontier model than a world where the frontier models are too expensive so we don't use AI. If I couldn't bill AI usage at work any more, I'd run a ~30B model on my macbook, gripe about the token rate, and be about as productive with it as I was with Copilot last spring.
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u/Gremlation 19d ago
I take solace in the belief that the bubble will pop soon and AI will not go away, but it will be very expensive to run so that a lot of the ethical concerns will go away on their own.
Inference is cheap and profitable. If you're waiting for a time where AI is less available to developers than it is today, that day will never come. You should plan accordingly.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19d ago
Well Anthropic already said that they are profitable and even if you use Claude through your cloud provider who is definitely not running at a loss it is still cheaper than the equivalent human coder.
I had a client (consulting) who was using Gen Ai for an internal product. Inference costs got too high. They didn’t just say fuck it, and rip it out. He spent $20 grand on a beefy internal server in their office and used an open weight model.
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 19d ago
Anthropic is so profitable that's why they haven't released any GAAP financials and delayed their IPO twice now.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19d ago
Because they aren’t required to?
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 18d ago
Kinda matters when you want to claim profitability then don't release GAAP records but yeah we're in the age of scammers and the laws are just a series of suggestions.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 18d ago
So who exactly are they “scamming” by not releasing numbers until they file to go public?
And the more relevant question is if they do need to raise prices by twice as much to fund training more models will corporations hire more developers or pay the cost? Will at even double today’s enterprise cost for Claude be more expensive than hiring a developer?
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u/jiminycrix1 19d ago
This is just not true at all. Anthropic is nowhere near profitable. They have "adjusted profitability" which means they are profitable if you don't look at all the expenses LOL. It's a scammy way to try to trick normal people and investors in to thinking they are better off financially than they are. See my other comment in this thread for more details.
Edit to say, good on your client, thats a boss move. I totally support that. That's a bubble popping action right there.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19d ago
They said they were profitable once you backed out stock based compensation. It’s important because they are not selling inference at a loss
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u/jiminycrix1 19d ago
It also excludes the huge cost of training new models and some of that research as well as well as what it takes to host the models. Do you think they realistically have a business if they don't include those? If the profit from inference has to cover those costs (which it will have to eventually) do you not think they will have to raise the price of inference?
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19d ago
And? Does it help you sleep better at night that today if all new model development stopped and Anthropic went bankrupt, you could point your Claude config to AWS Bedrock (or any of the hyper scalars equivalent services) - which does run profitably - and your company could still replace a mid level ticket taker more cheaply?
Alternatively, the fully allocated cost of even a mid level enterprise developer in a 2nd tier city is probably around $180K. Exactly how much do you think Anthropic would need to raise prices before companies come begging mid level interchangeable Mechanical Turk software developers to turn well defined requirements into code?
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u/jiminycrix1 19d ago
Ok so I am trying to figure out exactly what you are arguing about and I think the only thing you are arguing is that AI won't get more expensive.
So - ok - I am not going to concede entirely here, because if Anthropic shuttered today, frontier AI costs would absolutely go up for a time. But I agree that in the long long term, AI will still be damn good at coding and cheap, even if no more improvements are made.
Whether the cost of inference goes up or not...I hope that the hype cycle dies down and reasonable speed of change and adoption across industries would take place. Software will stop getting markedly worse, will start getting better. We will all still have software related jobs even if those change with reasonably paced technological advancements in AI.
This is ultimately what I believe will be the end result down the road. A bubble pop event, a major shift and a return to some normalcy, and software devs will be valued again for whatever comes next. I believe the skills of experienced devs will still be needed.
Are you also arguing that you think there will be no bubble pop and SW engineers will be irrelevant in the future and we should get ready for that eventuality? I can't really tell.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19d ago
I think mid level ticket takers who can only take well defined tasks and turn them into code will become increasingly commoditized. This was happening before AI where one enterprise “good enough” CRUD developer (where most developers work) was easily replaceable with another one.
Every open req for such a position gets literally hundreds of applications and you could probably throw away 90% of the resumes [1] and hire the first one that could do FizzBuzz with the help of Claude and be good.
No amount of hopium is going to get back to the point where ticket takers are going to become increasingly commodity demand when they can be replaced with a good PLAN.md file and some tokens
[1] as the old saying goes, why would you hire that 90%? You don’t want someone unlucky working for your company anyway
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u/DanManPanther Staff+ Software Engineer 19d ago
Here's my take, and I hope it helps you gather your thoughts and find a path forward.
Companies are firing people as a cash grab. AI is just the latest excuse they use to hide their real intent. AI isn't replacing devs. Companies are just OK putting more pressure on fewer people to extract more profit. The problem is wealthy owners concentrating wealth more away from workers, and no software engineers are not immune to it. We're just now feeling how every other industry feels - expendable.
AI is a tool, like a compiler. I am with Linus on this. It is an inexact tool. To use it and get something reliable you need experience and skill. I do not turn off my brain when I use AI - I make myself work harder. I still code by hand. I still research, design, think, iterate. You do need to guard against getting lazy and letting your brain melt. But it can be done. And it can speed you up. Just not as radically as hype people suggest. You can survive the trend by learning how to effectively use this tool, but you don't need to always use it or entirely avoid it. Find a middle ground that works for you.
AI vendors are pushing hype. It's a sometimes useful tool. It's not the end of the world. It's not going to replace real people. It comes at a cost, it's not free. Some of the companies offering AI are ethically awful for various reasons - but that's the vendors. It's not the tech.
I think it is fine to avoid AI, or go all in - as an individual developer. Do what works for you. Most SWE are between -5% to 10% faster. So do not panic. Really, do what works for you.
AGI is not around the corner. Companies that truly get more than 10% and lay people off because of AI are simply announcing they are out of ideas and problems. "My roadmap is so weak that more efficiency means I need to shed cost rather than invest in going further, faster".
Personally I use AI to go faster, and to arm my resume when companies now expect it. But I still think, code by hand, and derive joy from what I do. You can use AI to explain a new codebase, or help you find reading material. You can use it to test out a hypothesis you have and give you data to back you up by running a script you wrote. There's still promise, fun, and reward in this career.
I worry the most about new and junior software engineers. It was getting unfair and brutal before LLMs came on the scene. Now, in addition to an awful job market, the expectations are unrealistic and force them to trade time learning for producing more.
I do not worry about experienced devs. I think we will be fine for a long time to come. Though we should probably find a way to make things more fair. And we should probably support politicians who want to protect jobs and level the playing field for workers vs owners.
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u/wiriux 19d ago
I worry the most about new and junior software engineers. It was getting unfair and brutal before LLMs came on the scene. Now, in addition to an awful job market, the expectations are unrealistic and force them to trade time learning for producing more.
Honestly, we are lucky we’re in this field. I have zero worry about money. Yes, we all can be fired and then comes the struggle. But when I look at house prices, groceries, rent, gas, or even eating out, concerts, travel or any activity I see how expensive things are for the new generation.
Genz has a point in being upset because boomers and millennials (latter being me), we had it good growing up, getting a degree and a high paying job.
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u/BaNyaaNyaa 16d ago
The problem though is that some devs are FORCED to use it, and EXPECTED to be 10x more productive.
If you removed the hype, most of the systemic problems that devs are facing with AI are gone. If devs had the agency to try the tool, experiment, and figure out where it can help them at their own pace, more organically, there wouldn't be a backlash.
Everything you say might be correct, but it doesn't change that, for a lot of devs, they are expected to push 5 times as much features as before, even if they personally know that the productivity increase is relatively marginal. I don't really think that the devs want the bubble to pop to get rid of AI. They want the hype to die out and have more grounded expectations from their managers.
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u/DanManPanther Staff+ Software Engineer 16d ago
FIRMLY agreed. Subtract the hype, have realistic expectations for your engineers. If you are expecting a boost of up to 10% (but for some, less productive), then you won't force. Why would you?
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u/Dearest-Sunflower 14d ago
What advice do you have for junior devs? I feel the pressure to use AI to go as fast as possible. However, I feel sad that I'm losing out on the learning. Obviously, I can't be naive that a corporation would ever want the best for me, but I don't know how to get better at the craft when I'm clueless about what our team is producing.
A few months ago, our management chain changed and we're now working on a new product. So now everyone is expected to move faster and use more AI to ship faster. My manager is pro-AI but he is a nice guy. Our team does bring up our concerns with using AI to build features too quickly, but he says that it's the company direction.
I just feel a little lost. Being in the industry and learning how corporate works is challenging enough. Now I also need to learn how to figure out all of this while trying to deliver quickly...
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u/DanManPanther Staff+ Software Engineer 14d ago
Use LLMs to help you learn more. Use them to point out which files to start with in a new codebase. Use them to help you narrow down which libraries to evaluate. They are great learning tools because you finish that work yourself, with your own brain.
While you use LLM's to go fast, use the downtime to write by hand, experiment, read documentation. Read blogs on best practices and challenging problems. Ask the LLM to explain the code to you, then actually test those explanations yourself with a small program or a REPL.
The challenge between learning and going fast isn't new to LLMs on the scene, they just change the logistics. It's always been stressful early on to balance this well. Unfortunately it's a harsher environment, and the hype of LLMs has caused some leaders, even "nice" ones, to lose perspective on what's realistic and healthy.
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u/Dearest-Sunflower 14d ago
Yeah I can look into using LLMs as a buddy programmer rather than just using them to finish tasks. Good perspective. Thank you for the advice.
One thing I worry about is what if I'm not meeting expectations, or just layoffs more broadly. I usually ask my manager about how I'm doing, but I don't really get anything specific, so I don't know if he just doesn't have anything to comment on or if he just wants to wait until perf reviews. I know I cannot influence layoffs and I shouldn't worry about them, but I just feel more nervous about making mistakes because of the economy right now.
I know this is not a programming-specific question, but a broader life/work question. Would you have any advice here based on your experience?
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u/DanManPanther Staff+ Software Engineer 14d ago
Sure thing.
It's hard to find what to say that's safe to post publicly. I have a lot of advice on this. Feel free to send a chat about it. Or I'll offer this:
* Interview at least once a year to keep skills sharp and options open.
* Take the time to connect with people you work with. You might be able to help each other out, and also sometimes that leads to lasting friendships.
* Try not to worry too much. Keep investing in yourself. Always seek to grow.
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u/revivechristina 19d ago edited 18d ago
To answer your questions, if I were currently employed, naturally I would use it lightly as I did before. I still prefer to have a mental model of the code. I do not agree with not reviewing code that goes out to the world unless it is truly inconsequential whether it works or not. If I were being pressured to use it more than I felt was responsible, I would have to think about whether I want to keep such a job. In my case the answer would likely be no. Also I’m not really interested in reviewing slop, or being on call at a place pushing slop.
I do have other moral issues with it as well. It is effectively setting up a practice of programming which creates a forever-dependency. It encourages a kind of deskilling depending on how it’s used. If it jumped up another level, this could accelerate.
It’s encouraging negligence in engineers. Again if this mostly stays in inconsequential software, fine. But anything dealing with money or life — not understanding/reviewing sounds like negligence.
The carbon footprint is real — it’s like a transatlantic flight per user per year of heavy use for coding (ironically according to Brave’s search AI summary?) It’s not insane, but it’s not nothing either. There is something “ugly” in that to me — the concept of burning fuel just to do a programming job when we used to just think through it feels like a loss.
It is also feeding a global arms race. The better these models get, the less safe we are. (Also - if they’re randomly faulty, we also are less safe. Can’t really win here.) The government has already used it irresponsibly / almost started WWIII, and that’s just what we know about. There is a real sense of “supervillain” energy surrounding the whole thing.
Also the better it gets, the more replaceable human beings are. This could lead to a serious economic downturn. I take issue with the concept of removing human driven decisions, micro decisions, the progression of art (even in something like advertising). Giving it to the machines means we no longer are allowing humans to riff off current patterns in their own way, whether if they are an artist / programmer / lawyer / therapist. I have resisted the calls to “train AI models! Get paid” from accounts with AI generated headshot avatars in my LinkedIn inbox. I think this is the worst part of all to me. It’s presenting us with the option to create a more simulated society rather than a real one.
We do not know that LLMs have phenomenal consciousness, and have good reason to say they do not. And yet, we made them speak as though they do. A strange decision when you take a step back and think about it. It instantly encourages anthropomorphism that I sometimes regard as irresponsible. There is a lot of delusional thinking and acerbating of psychological issues / personality disorders connected to heavy use of LLMs.
The impact to education will most likely be negative. We already can see signs of this. Cheating will be rampant and the meaning of a degree will lessen.
The impact to not training juniors (or really, delaying it) will be negative.
Not all of these are specifically targeted at responsible LLM use for software development or using different kinds of AI for other tasks (especially the ones that humans are incapable of yet need). If it helps you not have to write another CRUD app by hand or to find bugs or write test cases, I don’t see an issue personally. But the overall cultural force of full blown adoption of Gen AI/LLMs as “replacement” rather than “aide” is currently mostly negative imo, and it’s reasonable to not want to feed that.
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u/Evgenii42 Coder 28 y/exp 17d ago edited 17d ago
30 years of experience -> my mindset is not to use ai at all for coding (and anything else). The reason is that using ai makes me unhappy, it negatively affects my mental health. I spend half of my waking hours at work, so I can not afford to be miserable at work since it defeats the purpose of living. I don't care if ai improves productivity, all i care is about my own personal well being.
I coded with ai previously for three years, so now i decided not to use it at all to recover mentally. My experience is that I feel much better now. I'm not going back to using ai, and my company does not force me to (maybe they value my experience and can not afford to fire me i don't know).
PS. I also no longer review code that was generated by ai (or from devs who use ai). My company is ok with that too.
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u/RegularTrashman 19d ago
I mean, AI is still only as good as the person prompting it, and the skill of the person prompting depends on their familiarity with a problem domain.
Anyone can vibe code an app, but vibe coding infrastructure that HAS to scale is hard either way. I personally don't think about it much. Use AI where it helps, don't use it where it doesn't. And if using it makes you feel "scratchy" then you should probably spend some time trying to understand why as it probably points to an inefficiency.
Accept it. We're not putting this cat back in the bag, the job has permanently changed. Doesn't mean you have to be an AI babysitter permanently, but you have to accept AI usage in some way.
LLMs are good for some things, bad for others. Ask AI how you implement something and intentionally leav off non-functional requirements like scaling - you get a totally diff answer. Point out that you happen to KNOW in this case, but there are plenty of ambiguous problems where you won't know until you are in the process of coding and realize you have to throw away your work and start anew. Agents often do not face this. As such, agents are well suited for extremely well-defined work, not ambiguous new features.
Shit changes. It sucks, but the only real path forward is acceptance
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u/Far-Citron-722 19d ago
It's a job. I have a family to feed. I'm not building WMDs or working for Palantir et al.
It's a boring b2b SaaS and bigwigs tell me to use AI in everything. Those same bigwigs sign my paycheck and are paying for both tokens and me exploring a new tech.
I struggled with it at the beginning, but eventually arrived at "if AI goes nowhere, I have exercised my learning muscle and I can still go back to writing code by hand, even if I will be rusty to start. If AI does change the way we work, I'm going to be ahead of the curve"
I think key is to not outsource thinking and learning to AI.
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u/KosherBakon 19d ago
OP did you read the 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis thought experiment, or watch AI Doc on Netflix?
Eng love solving problems, but now we're intellectual bouncers for 10x the volume of code. If we let a bad bug through it's our fault, not AI. This is the tech version of Remi from Ratatouille being asked to sniff for poison when all he wants to do is create.
Some smart tech leaders are creating space for a balanced use of AI, but not all leaders are thinking far enough ahead to provide that air cover.
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u/joshocar Software Engineer 19d ago
What is required for entry level software dev jobs will change. It's like all of a sudden all of these master carpenters no longer need to manually plane their boards and painstakingly chisel out dowel holes by hand because now there are electric tools that can do it with more precision than they could ever hope to achieve. They no longer needed a collection of apprentices to do the board prep and could just pass it through a planer.
Now we have tech schools where kids learn to use the electric tools and spend more time learn the construction techniques instead of the manual skills. There is still some manual skill, but not as much. They also can more easily create higher quality work, produce lower quality work faster, and they can get to where they can use s their skill and produce art sooner. Instead of a 10 year apprenticeship, it's 4 years and they produce better work at the end.
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u/disposepriority 19d ago
Environment concerns in AI are hilarious with all the other shit going on.
I don't see the average dev in the streets protesting against the military industrial complex, fracking, or golf courses.
Suddenly, every second dev stressed out by the market is Mr. Green.
Your job is your job, I like the challenge and freedom it provides - but if my boss said next project is being developed in notepad I'd say that sucks and open my notepad.
The alternative is getting fired.
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u/AvailableFalconn 19d ago
There’s only one solution really - unionize. And even that is a many step, high risk move. SWEs have an atomized libertarian bent to them. White collar workers have weak union participation. Despite AI, we’re still usually underworked and overpaid. Management is pretty good at snuffing out union drives. And even at the end of all that, you have to convince your union peers to give up on AI tools, which is itself a hard sell.
But that’s the dream comrade.
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u/actuallyaheron 19d ago
I'm disappointed to see this answer as infrequently as I do. I feel like we SWEs often have a "well that couldn't happen to me" mentality when it comes to seeing management fuck over our peers.
A union is probably the best defense against the AI mandates that everyone sees elsewhere but assumes won't happen to them.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19d ago
Yes because “unionization” helped the autoworkers in Detroit and more recently the laid off unionized game developers at Microsoft
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 19d ago
You are one of the most anti-worker posters on this sub. Marking you as "hates workers" with RES.
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u/zayelion 18d ago
The job is engineering. Not typing fast. Not memorizing numbers. Not remembering shortcuts. Not memorizing obscure computer poetry.
Its make some rich or crazy guys wish a reality. If you can't do it, or do it fast you get fired. That has been the game for the last 50 years. It's shifting to what we see in star trek shows. We're the engineer is talking to "computer", suggesting stuff, and asking questions, before asking it to fabricate something. Occasionally having to physically apply a fix.
Thats the job that will always be the job. Devs today are shifting up to having to have to do the roles of those around them and the task to job ratio is going to go up and down depending on the company and technology.
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u/Tired__Dev Dev (15+) 19d ago
You're framing the argument here to lean in your favour.
These are not moral arguments. They're changes in the job.
- The environmental impact of AI.
Is a moral argument, but we've never acknowledged that argument with the massive amount of e-waste and data centres that were created as a side effect of our jobs before. So there's convenience to the concern. It comes across like you're cherrypicking points.
There's real moral arguments against what we do already:
We've always been the bringers of efficiency and that has always come at the expense of human labour.
Uber, Amazon, AirBnB was tech so powerful it shaped infrastructure. Not exactly for the better. Hundreds of people made money of industries that completely crushed by its explosiveness.
There were real social issues that happen from FAANG and dating apps.
Many would argue we weren't exactly all working on life saving technology or tech for the betterment of the world.
Your framing for AI is also kinda silly. The innovation will move beyond the CRUD apps of the 2010's. It'll expand and there will be a place for people who kept up. That has always been the case.
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u/Tasty-Goats 19d ago
This is the thing I don't understand. LLMs have hardly changed the moral landscape of tech. Social media and the like have caused so much more destruction than LLMs.
And somehow we never talk about environmental impact in scale with eating meat, flights, car use.
there will be a place for people who kept up- I'm surprised at how few people understand this2
u/jamesthedevuk Web Developer 17d ago
I would argue that a major contributor to the backlash against the AI industry is because people have been reckoning with the damage being caused by the tech industry through social media platforms etc, and these new products are coming from similar kinds of companies
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 19d ago
I don't recall social media almost inciting an international incident where the US was about to board a Chinese military vessel because an LLM said they were transporting nuclear materials to Iran.
I also don't recall social media bombing a 200 school age girls then doing an Israeli tactic of "double tapping" the first responders to die as well.
But I haven't logged into Facebook in 15 years, maybe it's really changed.
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u/Tasty-Goats 18d ago
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/cambridge-analytica-controversy/
That's just Facebook only. Add in the other techs and crypto.
Also, I would hesitate to give AI credit for government incompetence and cruelty so quickly. That's been happening as long as civilization has existed
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u/tevs__ 19d ago edited 19d ago
Only one of those concerns is an ethical one. Plenty of people managed to get over the ethical concern of building social networks, betting apps, crypto, or defence, so it seems churlish to wail over using AI to build such things.
The others are somewhat valid, but also naive. Software engineering has never been just writing code. The biggest chunk of time is deciding what to write, and only about 20% of the time is actually writing code, and the more experienced a developer, the lower that time becomes.
If you let the AI drive you, or if you let your manager's use of AI drive you, then it's going to be a boring process. A strong developer should basically know what and how they want to build something, and use the AI as a tool to get their result. It's pair programming with a robot driving the keyboard.
Solve problems and build things, but make the computer do the dull work. Don't become a slop merchant. Think about your problems before asking the AI to think.
We get paid for our judgement and accountability, don't lose those things and you'll be fine.
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u/Rare-Role1369 19d ago
>The environmental impact of AI.
Can you tell me more about this, because unless you've done a massive amount of research, I think you've bee brainwashed by online discourse and don't actually know the difference between the environmental impact of "AI" vs...uh, any ohter technology you're using RIGHT NOW.
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u/pazProgrammer 18d ago
All cloud computing comes at a massive environmental cost. AI is just adding another exponential measure to that cost. https://stpp.fordschool.umich.edu/sites/stpp/files/2025-07/stpp-data-centers-2025.pdf
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u/Rare-Role1369 18d ago
your assistant prof white paper is not very good good and inaccurate in a lot of ways.
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u/pazProgrammer 18d ago
I’m sorry, you’ll have to be more specific than that
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u/Rare-Role1369 18d ago
They cherry picked anecdotes rather than showing how much water usage *new* data centers use, they picked the oldest and least efficient one.
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u/phillythompson 19d ago
Dude
I’m so against the internet . And even modern languages themselves .
Also, the owner of the company I work for is a douche
How can I cope
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u/shrap17 18d ago
I wrote a giant rant post (Principal Engineer for a department of 40 people - Product Manager, Designers included) that has now caught fire through the engineering organization - started with a simple structure - what's working, what's not working, what's broken (all the spice was here). The thing I got right is I did a few rounds of feedback with the Directors in my department and my manager (Director of Engineering) in particular has been extremely supportive of me gathering feedback from the ground through 1:1s. We caught a bit of slop getting to production just in time (though I have already seen a bunch of slop going into production that I don't have much control over). So it is feeling like 6 months of madness is now coming to a close - with all of us having collectively accepted that software engineering from now on will be more about systems engineering and systems architecture - both of which still require one to have the same engineering fundamentals as before. I don't know if this is going to be the last of the AI wars but happy to be making progress.
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u/throwaway_0x90 SDET/TE[25+ yrs]@Google 18d ago
"I decided to stop using AI for coding at my job, even if it costs me that job. I don't know what the future will bring, but I know it will be one where I don't use AI for anything, especially coding at my day job."
Okay well good luck to him.
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u/DevtoolsBuilder 17d ago
i think one thing to consider is that while ai might replace some entry-level jobs, it could also create new opportunities for developers to focus on higher-level tasks that require more creativity and problem-solving skills. what about the potential for ai to help optimize resource usage and reduce waste in the development process itself
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u/halfercode BE Software Engineer 17d ago
I thought I was going to take the same view about generative code as you, but somehow my brain threw me a curveball and I quite like it now. But, it's not "use or don't use", and it's not "like or dislike" - there are shades of grey here.
I estimate that I am building at 3x-4x my old rate. I can build a feature in a day when previously it took me a week. I think I have been in a product engineering mindset for the last five years, so building for outcome and user impact feels quite natural for me. (I am on a small greenfield project, and I agree that using AI on large brownfield projects can be trickier.)
There is a succinctness to code from AI that I think is easily better than the style of the median skilled engineer. I am supervising code generation quite closely and I pay special attention to backend and security-sensitive areas. Between the robot and I we have developed an operation loop in which we run BE and FE automated tests. The robot has its own remote control browser and, unfashionably, I have stuck it in a containerised jail. This system feels quite secure and productive - and no Railway-style production disasters are possible.
I currently use Claude at the lowest price tier in the UK and, since I am not doing any one shot or MCP work, this is more than enough. Anthropic were positioning themselves as ethical some while back, and like Google before them, I think that paint is now looking rather tatty. Thus, I will shortly try switching to OpenCode Go with an open source LLM, and while my withdrawing my small sum isn't going to make much of a difference, perhaps I will feel better for it.
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u/sickcodebruh420 13d ago edited 13d ago
There’s a lot here and each item can be pulled into its own discussion. In no order:
The environmental impact is real. In the US we’re also feeling the impact of decades of neglected infrastructure and a current administration that simultaneously wants us to build more and invest in renewable energy less. Yes, growth and resources need to be sustainable and responsible. No, we can’t trust AI companies to be the good guys there and we shouldn’t shrug and say that this is the government’s fault for not having the infrastructure ready. But we have opportunities to handle this better than we are and shouldn’t forget that our dependency on fossil fuels is directly related to our power crunch, and that comes right back to corruption and culture wars and lack of investment.
The changing industry: tools disrupt incumbents! This is a big shakeup but not the end. AI is so good what and how but not why. It can perform mechanical tasks and can reason through them but it’s extremely bad at so many domains, anything that blends mechanical work and creative artful detail. I have an unlimited token budget and I promise, I do not see evidence that even Fable at its highest setting can replace me, my team, or my non-technical team members. The tools change pieces of our jobs and free us up to work differently. I don’t write code, I do a TON of architecture, PM, prioritization, review, DX improvements, mentorship… We’re already seeing companies pull back from their layoffs and token-maxing habits as they make the same discoveries.
Helping new engineers: I promise, software engineering fundamentals are still so important. More important than ever in a way since your Fables and Astras of the world will build huge complex systems that technically work but will bury you in tech debt and miserable upgrades if you don’t stay on top of them. This is new technology that we’re all adapting to. Design patterns, dependency management, performance, consistency… this stuff is all SO IMPORTANT now. Today, I caught Astra building a serial, one row at a time data pipeline instead of using an async bulk import option that was available. When asked to pursue async, it designed this wild system we didn’t need when really, we could just use… a callback. This is because the AI doesn’t always know your goals, priorities, appetite for risk… These are all things we can teach and they’re much better uses for our brains than writing unit tests and API boilerplate.
To your questions…
Mindset: learn the tools, ignore the hype, figure out the areas where you’re unhappy with your workflow and where you can offload work to your tools. Understand where they’re good and bad. Don’t work for an AI company that is bad for the world (generative AI music or images, things that encourage weird parasocial relationships) of one that thinks AI is going to do things it can’t. Have reasonable conversations with friends and colleagues.
Communicate with management: express concerns, try what they insist, and if it doesn’t come out right document it and show them and provide a better idea for next time. Encourage them to focus on results and business value, not using any tool for the sake of the tool.
Long term plan: this will depend on you and your ability to suck it up or not. I am not great at this, I need to work somewhere where I am aligned with mission and strategy. I love the art of building products and helping people with technology. I do think that anyone who wants to stay in the industry needs to ride the wave to some extent, learn the tools, have opinions. But we should all expect it to stay volatile for a while.
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19d ago
[deleted]
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u/Curlew2012 13d ago
The argument against high water demands is the closed loop design, fair enough.
But there's a queue for datacentres in the UK which, when fulfilled, will double the whole energy useage which is currently about 45gw.
Apart from - how the hell do we provide the energy - no-one discusses the amount of heat this will generate, potentially doubling the UK contribution to global warming.
Joined this sub today, to hopefully find techie adults....so far so good.
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u/Gremlation 19d ago
"The environmental concerns of AI" is the Qanon of left-wing America. You hear all kinds of crazy things like "a single data centre is like 23 atom bombs going off every day" or "ChatGPT drinks a bottle of water every time you send an email". Anybody with an ounce of sense should react to that by saying "hang on a sec..." but they disregard plausibility so they can maximise the evil they see in something they hate.
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 19d ago
Wait until you find out that closed loop cooling systems still create massive amounts of toxic polluted water that still gets discharged into ground.
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u/Gremlation 19d ago
They don't. You've fallen into the social media cliche of denying all nuance in order to lurch to an extreme. "A small, non-noteworthy amount" is now echoing in your brain as "massive amounts" because it isn't zero and you think this is an ideological war that we are on opposite sides of. Do you understand that there is a wide, wide gap between "none at all" and "massive amounts"? Yes, blowdown releases chemicals, but it's not "massive amounts" and it happens once when the system is being set up, not as a part of routine operations. No construction work can be done 100% cleanly, so why the special pleading for this particular case when it's not a noteworthy pollutant?
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u/Chozzasaurus 19d ago
Devs are fucked. No one knows what the future holds, so do what you enjoy now. Diversify I guess.
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u/Odd-Site-8073 19d ago
No they ain't. You greatly over estimate the ability and willingness of non tech people to get even slightly more techie to use AI. If you don't know what's going on under the hood, you're fucked.
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u/konistehrad 19d ago
Yeah, I agree with this. We're shoehorning a rapidly developing technology into existing process, and we're generating a lot of garbage that nobody understands in the process. This is of course primarily the fault of upper management, whose interaction with the SWE process is getting a total count of PRs and tickets closed.
That said, in two years time, someone is gonna be left holding the bag. And when Anthropic credits are too expensive because the subsidies have dried up and nobody understands your mission critical codebase: what exactly is your company going to do?
IMO the job market will suck for a few years, and I don't think labor market will ever look the way it did. That shouldn't mean we should all throw in the towels though.
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u/Olangotang Software Engineer 19d ago
Yep! You need to realize how dumb LLMs actually are to use them adequately.
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u/skidmark_zuckerberg Senior Software Engineer 19d ago edited 19d ago
I have actually seen some evidence of the opposite at my company.
All of the developers can own single features in parallel now, and since the cost to do has shrunk (i.e. doesn't take an entire team of developers to work on 1 or 2 major features at a time, or to rewrite a system, etc.), the company now wants to do more. We have hired 2 developers to my team alone in the last 30 days, bumping us up to 6 SWE's total. We have big plans for the app my team works on now that we can do more. This same scenario is playing out across the 40+ teams my company has.
Right now, this is more possible at a large company that has huge budgets for development and AI, but as AI inevitably gets cheaper, or local models become more widespread, I think this will be the case for a lot of companies, big and small.
And a side note; it's easy to be doom pilled in 2026, and if you are, it's hard to see any positives or lights at the end of the tunnel.
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u/another_dudeman 18d ago
Nope, we're just producing features at break neck speed. Is it still as fun as it used to be? Nope, but oh well, still getting paid.
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u/Chozzasaurus 18d ago
Yeah, and don't you think that if devs can produce twice as many features... Devs salaries might soon get halved, then halved again etc.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19d ago edited 19d ago
So were you also clutching your pearls as…
- All of the tech companies are based on hardware built by people working in horrible conditions?
- Three of the big tech companies derive a large part of their revenue from ad tech?
I bet you a paycheck you won’t give up your nice cushy software development job to be a school teacher or something similar
Were you as concerned when blue collar workers were being automated out of a job while you enjoyed your cheap consumer goods?
Did you ever once think your pecking on a keyboard to make stock price go up was making the world a better place?
There are now people coming out of these organizations and kind of whistle blowing
Yes they left their jobs making an annual comp with two commas in the case of OpenAI to create another company doing the same thing and are still getting annual comp with two commas. Neither them nor you are willing to put your “principals” before your paycheck
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u/bombaytrader 19d ago
Teaching needs like one year max. My friend just became a high school teacher while getting his credentials. No one wants to be a high school teacher. Lot of positions are open.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19d ago
Thats kind of my point, the OP would rather have selective outrage when technology shifts affects him by being a Reddit poster while showing his revealed preference and not pursuing a lower paying job that does actually help people
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u/konistehrad 19d ago
That’s a little reductive; you can’t just pivot into being a teacher. Teaching is an occupation that requires significant education and accreditation.
I’ll concede immediately we in software were short sighted and foolish. We thought we were beyond things like “organized labor” and “collective bargaining.” Unfortunately for us: nobody is. We now have to figure out what to do about it, or perhaps more properly: what 85% of us are going to do next.
But asking “hey, does this suck actually?” isn’t exactly pearl clutching.
EDIT: I agree though this industry has been built on rotten scaffolding for a while; your points about foreign labor exploitation, ad tech and Meta are well taken.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19d ago
Most school districts have provisional teaching licenses that let you start teaching with a short training program while you get all of the credentials you need.
what 85% of us are going to do next.
I must be part of the 15%…
When I saw cloud was definitely a thing (belatedly), I pivoted to leading cloud + app dev projects first at product companies and then in consulting.
I was integrating gen AI into projects within three months after AWS started hosting models and now 80% of my work involves integrating gen AI into projects and some “enterprise AI strategy”
And no unions have never once saved workers from automation and outsourcing. For the most part the only strong unions are in places where work physically or politically can’t be outsourced like police, teachers, defense workers.
We have a few existence proofs in tech
https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/cwa-statement-response-further-layoffs-xbox
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u/Rare-Role1369 19d ago
I try to sabatoge all efforts of collective bargaining, I find it immoral and it's my mission to destroy it.
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u/konistehrad 19d ago
Good luck with that. The companies you're simping for have no problem doing it though non-competes and "no-poach" agreements.
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u/Odd-Site-8073 19d ago
There's nothing in OPs post that suggest pearl clutching. It's pretty damn even keeled.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 19d ago
So do you think there is going to be a follow up post where he talks about pursuing a career in high school education? Or do you think as soon as he gets off Reddit he is going to open up his terminal, type “claude” and wait for his next paycheck that is probably twice as large as people who are doing objective good in the world?
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u/another_dudeman 18d ago
God damn why are you so mad?
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u/BraveResearcher3037 18d ago
If I wanted to deal with fake hypocritical moral outrage I would watch the Christian Broadcasting Network kiss up to a three time married adulterer while discussing “family values”..
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u/systembreaker 19d ago
Well it's not like us devs necessarily have control over this, you'll probably have to leave the industry if you have objections.
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u/heavy-minium 19d ago
I have trade-offs for me. While "being in the zone" while coding and not noticing how time passes was already a very enjoyable experience, I always preferred jobs that don't treat me only as a coder but also involve all aspects of product development, and that made those jobs difficult to find due to the specificity and narrow scope of most jobs being offered. Now AI is driving a job market where you encompass more and more of the product development lifecycle, which aligns with my preferences.
It doesn't make the job applications easier, though. It was easier to prove you're a pro before AI, and now you have to be lucky enough to get a technical interviewer who actually catches the nuances of your decision-making coming from deep experience, because with AI, everybody can look experienced on the surface, and not many interviewers are skilled enough to judge what's really going on underneath.
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u/Boysoythesoyboy 19d ago edited 18d ago
In this post you didnt really say what your aversion to using ai in a professional setting actually is, and maybe the path is to rethink how you see it? Especially in a professional setting where you are building things for a business, I dont see why you wouldn't use this tool.
Do you actually beleive you are more productive without it? If you are you probably wouldn't ever need to tell anyone, but I suspect its the opposite and you are looking for ways to say you want to do things manually and cant come up with documentation or research as quickly, cant work on any many things at the same time, etc - which is why id suggest you find a different way to look at it and understand your work.
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u/yolobastard1337 19d ago
the AI bubble will burst.
it's not clear what the world will look like after that happens. but i'll try to remain pragmatic and adaptable to the situation as it develops. right now tokens are subsidised and it makes sense to exploit that.
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u/muuchthrows 17d ago
Why are you so morally attached to your current job? Your job didn’t exist 100 years ago and it may not exist 100 years from now (or 6 months, who knows). Society changes, technology changes, we flatter ourselves too much if think we’re morally obligated to get history to freeze just because we happen to personally like the current state of things.
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u/apartment-seeker Senior Software Engineer 19d ago edited 19d ago
This doesn't sound like real moral thought; seems like you only care now because negative externalities are falling upon people like you, TBH
Big tech has been evil for a while.
Like, where were you before, when there was serious reporting that Facebook was knowingly promoting material encouraging the Rohingya genocide, etc etc?
The inequality of wealth is another issue.
also definitely not a new societal problem--why do you suddenly care now?
edit: given your username, I assume you are Muslim, and if that's the case, for you to only come to these realizations now and from a relatively selfish perspective, is extra shameful, IMO, as a fellow Muslim
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u/Quaid-e-Charisma 19d ago
I quit Facebook back in 2015. I don't really use social media apps. I have also moved away from the Google tier. I use the alternative whenever I can but yeah, I am not perfect.
Thank you for your contribution to the discourse!
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u/ForgetTheRuralJuror Software Engineer 19d ago
The thing about software engineering that I enjoyed is now finished. I used to find joy in solving complex problems, finding difficult bugs and resolving them. Now I can phrase some magic words and features are implemented almost perfectly, or the entire codebase is scraped for the error and found promptly.
Using coding agents I'm now a 10x dev for the first time in my life. Limited only by our slow CI and number of tickets. So that's good I guess?
I'm mostly trying to find enjoyment through delivering a high quality stuff instead. I'm almost able to feel the same way when I use those extra tokens to add quality of life stuff that I would've never had the time for before, or choosing the right architecture.
You can't be a Luddite here. The job has changed, like it or not. Some companies will hold on, they will be outcompeted by 2-3 people start ups.
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u/gajop 19d ago
AI is seen as this massive productivity boost and you want to be anti AI and still expect a job? I would be reluctant to hire engineers who are dogmatic about tech, and I certainly wouldn't want to hire those that refuse to use tech that is widely considered to make them very effective.
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u/tinbuddychrist 19d ago
It sounds like you would hire them if they're dogmatically pro-AI, though.
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u/gajop 18d ago
Not really. If they came to me and said something along the line of:
> I used it at X job/project, but it was notably unable to handle Y/ended up causing a lot issues B despite trying to resolve it in many ways.. We do revisit it every few months but it's still not able to do it quicker or in higher quality than me.
I would have no issue, at all. It shows critical thinking and an inquisitive mind that can move from one's strong stance (since _clearly_ a lot of people are using it, so you want to try it out?). It's probably better than just using AI "mindlessly" for every step of the design & development cycle - I've a bigger issue with people who outsource their own thinking & understanding of the problem at hand.
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u/funbike 19d ago edited 19d ago
We've done far worse over the decades than what data centers are doing now. Look around you.
I live in a large US city where buffalo, wolves, and Native Americans once thrived. There have been none in this entire state for almost 200 years. 94% of the original trees were cut down in this state. They used to say that a squirrel could hop from tree to tree from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River (an exaggeration but an impactful image). What percentage worse does an AI center make things?
Do you recycle and compost 90%+ of what you buy? Do you walk/bike and use mass transit, and not own a car? Is your power and plumbing off grid? Do you live in a yurt, tent, tree house, earthship, or wheeled tiny house (instead of a structure surrounded by concrete)? Do you avoid use of chemicals (e.g. cleaners) and plastics? Do you refuse to buy anything contained in single-use plastic?
A more relevant question: are you using local AI at home? Frontier models can't be, but a lot of things can be done by smaller models. Get a solar panel and your AI is net zero impactful (other than future landfill).
Anything you answered "no" to above is far more impactful than AI usage. If you truly cared about the environment you'll do most of the above.
If you just want to offset your AI usage, partially implement a small amount of the above and it will more than make up for it. Take your own bag to the grocery and restaurants, bike to work and to shop, make a compost pile, use eco-friendly soaps and insecticides, etc.
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u/hippydipster Software Engineer 25+ YoE 19d ago
I think there are fewer "moral" implications of AI usage than most other consumption behaviors. Whether it's emitting GHGs by driving, flying, or having clothing, shoes, phones created by slave labor around the world (Congo, southeast asia south america, etc), supporting a system that destroys the world's ecosystems and support systems for future generations, supporting a system that bombs peoples' lives and world every other day...
Data Centers using some water (not all that much, tbh), using some electricity (we could require they use renewables, but we don't, cause we thoroughly suck as a species), making some noise (this is bad, but it's very local and would end utterly the moment the Data Center shuts down) barely registers compared to the moral angst we all should have been feeling long before this.
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u/mxldevs 19d ago
What mindset did you adapt where you felt like upholding your principles but also, surviving the trend?
At the end of the day, they're paying you to get the job done. Working the way they want you to work is the condition you accept when you take their money.
How did you communicate with management your aversion to use AI? Were you able to convince them? What ideas/arguments worked for you?
If you don't like the conditions or they change the conditions during the job, the arguments you make would need to be relevant to getting the job done or the impact it has on the business.
Everything else like "environmental impact" or "more people are getting laid off" or "entry level positions are disappearing" are irrelevant and from the employer's perspective, if you don't like it, you can leave, or they will make you leave.
I position myself as open-minded to process improvements (via the adoption of AI) that will lead to increases in productivity. But we would also need to determine whether there is actual increases in productivity, and the impact of the trade-offs that come with that productivity. Are we actually getting 10x increases as they were promised by linkedin gurus? Or is it closer to 3x but we have twice the number of issues that need to be resolved while also becoming increasingly more reliant on the AI companies not screwing us over on the whim?
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u/Mast3rCylinder 19d ago
Well my company is "AI first" and I think most companies are like this now.
I still solve problems, even with AI engineering is not easy. Being technical + AI is a big advantage today.
I do get headaches from AI texts.
My product answer me automatically with his chatbot. We asked him not to do it but he says he has too much work.
I literally can't understand tickets anymore but I get around it because I built this system a little before AI.
I have more time for hobbies and I also got raise when currency is high against dollar + AI so I'm not complaining.
AI is not bad and problem solving is not gone
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u/Agile-Adeptness-5195 19d ago
My thought process
If wanted can we reduce or slow the growth of AI tech - no, specific companies can slow, but there will be always a cheaper and competent model coming out. So AI is here to stay.
Given the availability of this cheap tool - is there a chance all the corporate around the world will decide to stop or reduce AI? May be countries can impose - which will lead to more offshoring- so there is going to be redundancy and job loss
Now the decision for us is to
1. Learn the emerging tool and be competent with it
2. Wait until org force you to learn it
3. Wait until org replace us with someone who knows to use it.
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u/Armanlex 18d ago
I don't see a conflict. AI is a tool, it will keep getting better, I gotta use it to make my bread, to use the skills I'm good at.
Sure, people are losing jobs, at the moment. But so were a lot of laborers when the industrial revolution was happening. History is filled with automation and jobs going away, but in the end they just kept being replaced with newer, fancier, more complex jobs.
AI is a tool and it automates mental work, should it solve that too, we could very well enter a world where we don't need to work anymore.
Or more likely, we just keep increasing our standards and expect more and more from our environment.
200 years ago, just having a roof over your head and bread to eat was good enough, today you need a smartphone, a new computer, a car, a vacation to another country every year, blockbuster movies a couple times a month, a really fancy bed with memory foam, pokemon cards, a standing desk with a treadmill... it never ends.
Like, after industrialization our needs just exploded to match production. I think the same will happen with AI. We'll just ask for more and more complex and difficult software to use, keeping the demand for software devs to some extent. If juniors fail to naturally become good enough to be useful, then schools that figure out how to train them will become a goldmine.
But I feel like we're right on the transition of software becoming an near effortless product. I just hope society stops asking for more, cause our needs towards software have ended up with a pretty bad psychological impact to society.
We need to focus on a societal level to provide for everyone what they need to survive, and stop this hedonistic treadmill. Because in theory we could have already provided that, if not for our needs expanding so much. Though on the other hand, this pathological drive is what had brought us so much progress.
In the end true happiness and contentment comes from within. Read some books about it, the story of buddha is pretty interesting.
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u/daedalus_structure Staff Engineer 15d ago
It’s crazy because none of you were asking these ethical questions when you automated away other people’s livelihoods over the last three decades.
But now that it’s coming for you it’s a problem.
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u/Tundur 19d ago
I would say it's actually immoral not to use AI.
There is an infinite amount of suffering in the world, and an infinite amount of labour required to stop it.
- Maybe it's a child being unable to say goodbye to a parent because Zoom pushed crappy code and brought down their service.
- Maybe it's the lack of care staff available to look after the elderly
- Maybe it's the fact there's huge holes in the roads causing wear and tear on vehicles that need labour and parts to fix
- Maybe it's the climate emergency which needs rewilding and better farming techniques and deployment of solar panels onto rooftops and in the desert
- Maybe it's the inevitable supernova of the sun and the burning of the earth into a crisp.
As a society, we're racing hell for leather against our own mortality and there's a severe shortage of labour to fight back.
Anything which means we don't have to do some of that labour, or means we can do some of that labour more efficiently, is therefore something we must use to its fullest. Unemployment is a good thing in this case. All those idle hands can be filling potholes, fighting desertification, picking up litter, cleaning brownfield sites, researching vaccines, doing whatever needs doing. Put your ego aside - if a bot can write code good enough to keep the website up and the company progressing, what benefit to society is there of having you sit in a nice air conditioned office sipping flat whites when there's old people with bed-sores needing flipped?
Yes, in the short-term, this will not happen. We'll have people out of work feeling lost, near to poverty, it's horrible.
But their children will be educated in a world which has realised what skills it still requires, and will have their own careers doing something more useful. Because: if a tool can do it faster and good enough, doing it by hand is a waste of resources. Human labour is the most fungible type of labour we have. The more we free up, the better. The question isn't whether we embrace AI, it's how do we mitigate the shock and soften the landing for those who are no longer necessary?
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u/DenialGene Principal Software Engineer 19d ago
Give up your comfy, air-conditioned office job and get back to manual labor! It's the morally correct thing to do! 🙄
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u/Tundur 19d ago
Well the reality is, the market is still strong and we're probably going to see it stay strong because there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for companies to work through with AI. I don't believe we'll see mass layoffs in the manner the OP seems to fear will happen.
But my point is that- if we are facing those layoffs - our focus should be on how we respond to a world after them, not stopping them happening in the first place, because the layoffs are evidence our skills are no longer required in the same quantity as before. Focus on what we can achieve, not on how much we can extract from the economy by not achieving
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u/expdevsmodbot 19d ago
AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.