Software dev here. I am good at it, and people pay me unreasonably high rates to come in and do things faster and better than they can.
It AI coding tools were useful, I’d use them.
AI slows me down twice:
- 60% productivity loss whenever I try to use it for anything else than a code search engine.
- When I have to follow up the -1x engineers who are using AI to become -10x engineers.
I have yet to see an AI adopter who actually gets shit done in a way that is meaningful to anyone exept their own psychotic selves.
“With Claude I managed to do this in one hour!” Bro, what you did was generate 120 lines of Javascript that badly reimplements what could be a single line of CSS. You could have used that hour to learn some CSS.
“Without AI coding tools, our team would have taken at least a month to make this barely-working standalone image upload page.” My brother in Christ you are proudly yelling at me that you are fucking incompetent! A webdev worth their salary can shit out something better than that in their lunchtime bathroom break!
There is no justice in this. Mass layoffs with selective re-hiring was the plan all along. If AI wasn’t the excuse, “the economy” would be and it would look the same.
Disrupt the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, indiscriminately. Then bet on being able to get enough of them to come back on weaker terms, weaker contracts, and with reset seniority.