That got me thinking that programming might be like that in the near future, it's still an impressive skill for a human to learn and master and it takes tremendous effort and the craft itself is beautiful, but economically it will just not matter anymore. The same way the music industry today is bigger than it ever was and there's tremendous money in it but 95-99 % of highly talented musicians will never earn a decent wage with it.

Then again, coming back to the music parable, for a long time "amateurs" can make music with software tools without having any talent or even knowing musical notation or anything about tempo. Does that make them musicians? So take solace in the fact that these people aren't programmers and never will be, they're just pushing buttons on a synth board watching the "music" that comes out.

That's what's scary isn't it?

There are people with more good taste and creativity than you.They actually built careers with it.

And that's who you need to catch up to now.

Or you can dig I guess and be an artisinal programmer. There's honour in that ,I hear. Just no paycheck.

Unfortunately, generally if people can do something, they will. And with AI systems they have been given one of the largest short cuts possible, thus they take it relentlessly. There is no concern for quality so long as it is good enough to benefit them.

They will try to rationalize it but it typically ends up in moral corruption of "If I don't, they will."

It saddens me because I saw the vision of what computers and connected technology could be in the 90's and 2000's, only to see it turn bitter.

I remember reading an essay by Richard Stallman calling all this kind of stuff out in the late 1980's and I kind of hate that he got it so right. In assuming that many will take the power play and the convenience means that this is the path we take.

The more you can walk away form this stuff the better even if you don't want to.

When you are starting out, you will tend not to get the best clients.

It’s ok to outgrow a client.

It's been amazing to participate in a hobby-turned-profession for the last two decades or so. But did we get into it because it was easy? No. Technology, computers, Internet, was a new world, full of excitement, mystery, and exploration. There may have been no immediate ROI in learning how to set up a Geocities site, but it was the gateway to HTML, programming, and eventually led to, what I hope has been, a rewarding career.

The industry isn't being "destroyed" by AI, that started happening with PE and MBAs long before, or maybe it was fucked from the get-go, and we've been very lucky to have had well-paying jobs for typing strange things into a computer. But now that it's easy for the non-tech commoner to do it, we're upset? Fishy NIMBYism something something.

I went through a similar disillusionment phase for a few months as I tried to apply my old thinking to this new era. I had to just let the AI agents own the line-level, function-level, and even class-level responsibilities, while I focused on the file names and writing good prompts. Naming is everything in computer science, as they say.

On personal projects, I'm executing on things that were out of reach before (or required extensive research), like (re)learning hardware, writing RTOS firmware, PCB design, etc. It's my learning PHP3/VB phase, and I love it. What matters now, more than ever, is to have good taste.

Give it time for the mindset shift to happen. Take a break, if you can. You won't miss anything anyway, a few new models, harnesses, and workflows will have appeared, and they take about 5 minutes to understand. So the differentiating factors between you and the next pleb are your fundamentals, good taste, and creativity.

Be like water, etc.