I’ve read a lot of posts like this on HN and it’s leaving a sour taste. They are inevitably written by someone in SWE or UX. And they read as very out of touch.

The phenomena of executives wanting to reduce headcount is not unique to this profession. In this current boom of AI, there are also customer support reps, or executive assistant type jobs who are also targets. And at the larger scale… reducing head count is a desire almost all executives share.

It is unfair to categorize a woodworkers desire to use hand crafts as “romantic”. In that line of thinking why is abstaining from AI to write code not also categorized as “romantic”? Is it difficult to consider that at some point someone would have wanted to build a cabinet or dining table while having understanding of the pliability, softness, or tactile feel of the wood itself?

Would these posts consider that maybe software engineering just benefitted from a period of unusually high ROI in training, and now that is regressing?

I just keep oscillating between "wow this is amazing and exciting and I can do so many things" and "but so can everybody else and what even is my scarce set of skills anymore?"

On the other hand, I seem to be getting a lot more mileage out of all this new tooling than many of my peers, so there's something.