The culture of the tech industry started going to shit in 2022/2023 after rates were hiked and before LLMs were capable of anything much.

There's more toxicity, more waterfall, more authoritarianism, less autonomy, more pressure. Consequently lower productivity, too.

Sometimes AI is just the label that gets slapped on "all the ways the tech industry has changed over the last 3 years".

2022/2023 is when the AI wrecking crews came in in full force

Yea there were layoffs blamed on AI even when GPT 3.5 couldnt write a line of code to save its life. That's public relations for you.

No exec wants to chalk up a layoff to a faltering company that can't grow sales even if it's not their fault.

At my job in 2023, after the staff engineers quit, new-hire engineers backed by new-hire managers pushed through a series of 5,000-10,000 line GPT 3.5 PRs affecting ludicrously convoluted, critical Makefiles designed and maintained by engineers who had left the company because of AI initiatives.

Even when AI couldn't write a line of code to save its life, I watched this company push out its strongest engineering talent to replace a series of well-constructed codebases with subhuman AI slop. They hired a wrecking crew of managers and engineers who were incentivized to ram the AI slop through as quickly as possible.

What happened to the project and to the company?

> But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.

I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel, sometimes, almost superhuman.

Do you take emotional ownership in the shape output artifact itself, or merely that it works?

>I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally.

The output, in my case, feels just as mine as the toppings I tell my local pizza store to add to whatever they're about to cook for me. It's tasty, and fills my stomach, but I didn't make it. I ordered it.

Ok. I had pizza last night. It was delicious. Most meals are packaged protein workout food. But I have a griddle and I love to make brunch, burgers, sliders whatever.

A lot of my job is really pizzas. Massive scale pizzas but still pizzas. God I hate making pizzas. Now I don’t really have to. That means I can focus more on a perfect burger. Or cooking a massive brunch for a crowd of friends. (Think: refactoring some giant hole that 5 years of pizza dug us, or rearchitecting an application rather than just porting it).

I’m definitely in the vocation not job position. I would do this even if we got post-scarcity utopia tomorrow.

I just remembered I used to make pizzas in college if they were short and I drew the short straw. Fuck me that was soul destroying. Much better to be working the bar.

LLMs have literally sparked my joy to build software which I couldn’t before because of literal time constraints and mental overload

I’m finding I’m able to learn more and pick up hobbyist projects easier w the help of Claude.

For the production stuff I still learn and watch it more closely.

Were you chasing the feeling of successfully solving a problem?

Yes, and it lead to ruin before llms were viable.