I wish I had better news, but really just want you to know you are not alone and I empathize with you. I do think there is a cost to pay when using AI to output all of the code. A deep mental model is impossible and this will have downstream impacts. I am hopeful this will settle into a happy middle ground where AI is used but not relied upon.
One outlet in all this AI craze is finding creative use of it in mundane work. For example, recently I made SIMD-level optimizations for XLS parser that is used maybe 2 times per day. Before AI I could never waste a week or two on doing something silly like that.
I'm sure the "price reckoning" will come to us when VC will find out they didn't have infinite money, but for now we can have some level of fun even with AI.
We used to be obsessed with elegant design and would lose sleep over an optimization. Since vibe coding came along, those days are gone for good. As technologists, we typically feel anxious about losing control over our code. The speed of AI makes it nearly impossible for us to carefully review the code.
We know AI makes mistakes all the time, and our job has become that of an AI corrector.
You are not wrong to have your feelings or to strongly identify your sense of self with your work; that is what we used to call “finding your vocation”.
I share your feelings and have been focusing my energy on learning local and open weights AI to work through it because it seems to be impossible to avoid it all entirely as a freelancer who needs to remain competitive, and a bit of righteous/ethics/sustainable process fire in my belly doesn’t hurt.
But focusing on how you feel first, and then hopefully thinking about other ways you can feel valuable, is not wrong.
You are not alone and I wish you the best.
I'm always curious, what are those "great things" requiring deep technical knowledge and years of expertise that these visionaries can finally provide with the help of LLMs?
I almost feel ashamed/mentally ill when i am reading how everyone is happy that their true visionnaire potential is finally unlocked while i just like to solve my silly puzzles.
Everything has, in fact, changed, and it is a task for those of us who cared about what was, to try to work out what is worth caring about.
As Annie Savoy says in Bull Durham, “the world is made for those who aren’t cursed with self-awareness”. You’re going to have to figure out new things to care about, but you can do it, because you found it the first time!
I have found many interesting things to care about. The problem is they all lack a single quality that allowed me to succeed in the realm of computers and technology: accessibility.
What did you found for yourself?
I am reconciling myself to the AI future by learning open weights tools, and I hope to learn how to use that in assistive technology.
Do you enjoy explaining things?
The irony is, my work is to train frontier llm's, so my own "child" killed my lifelong passion
I think the architecture around systems is un-replaceable like what I do now, is I create specs and then asks the agents to cook exactly as the spec.
What's your AI workflow btw?
>architecture Give me a reason why agent can't create great architecture when enough context is provided?
For example If I ask LLM to build an analytics system where, there is soooo much data to ingest and LLM uses postgresql for the DB but we know ClickHouse is the great fit here, given the analytics queries we need. So, then you are right LLM can definitly figure out ClickHouse or something better, If we provide full context of what we want, but getting to know the full system and feeding LLM with the right context is something where we need understanding of the tech-stack atleast in general (might not be specific to the underline language).
I don't believe LLM can ever build a system from end-to-end reliably.