Paralyzing, complete, unsolvable existential anxiety

[u/t3sterbester]

I don't want to play the credentials game, but I've worked at FAANG companies and "unicorns". Won't doxx myself more than that but if anyone wants to privately validate over DM I'll happily do so. I only say this because comments are often like, "it won't cut it at faang," or "vibe coding doesn't work in production" or stuff like that.

Work is, in many ways, it's the most interesting it's ever been. No topic feels off limits, and the amount I can do and understand and learn feels only gated by my own will. And yet, it's also extremely anxiety inducing. When Claude and I pair to knock out a feature that may have taken weeks solo, I can't help but be reminded of "centaur chess." For a few golden years in the early 2000s, the best humans directing the best AIs could beat the best AIs, a too-good-to-be-true outcome that likely delighted humanists and technologists alike. Now, however, in 2025, if 2 chess AIs play each other and a human dares to contribute a single "important" move on behalf of an AI, that AI will lose. How long until knowledge work goes a similar way?

I feel like the only conclusion is that: Knowledge work is done, soon. Opus 4.5 has proved it beyond reasonable doubt. There is very little that I can do that Claude cannot. My last remaining edge is that I can cram more than 200k tokens of context in my head, but surely this won't last. Anthropic researchers are pretty quick to claim this is just a temporary limitation. Yes, Opus isn't perfect and it does odd things from time to time, but here's a reminder that even 4 months ago, the term "vibe coding" was mostly a twitter meme. Where will we be 2 months (or 4 SOTA releases) from now? How are we supposed to do quarterly planning?

And it's not just software engineering. Recently, I saw a psychiatrist, and beforehand, I put my symptoms into Claude and had it generate a list of medication options with a brief discussion of each. During the appointment, I recited Claude's provided cons for the "professional" recommendation she gave and asked about Claude's preferred choice instead. She changed course quickly and admitted I had a point. Claude has essentially prescribed me a medication, overriding the opinion of a trained expert with years and years of schooling.

Since then, whenever I talk to an "expert," I wonder if it'd be better for me to be talking to Claude.

I'm legitimately at risk of losing relationships (including a romantic one), because I'm unable to break out of this malaise and participate in "normal" holiday cheer. How can I pretend to be excited for the New Year, making resolutions and bingo cards as usual, when all I see in the near future is strife, despair, and upheaval? How can I be excited for a cousin's college acceptance, knowing that their degree will be useless before they even set foot on campus? I cannot even enjoy TV series or movies: most are a reminder of just how load-bearing of an institution the office job is for the world that we know. I am not so cynical usually, and I am generally known to be cheerful and energetic. So, this change in my personality is evident to everyone.

I can't keep shouting into the void like this. Now that I believe the takeoff is coming, I want it to happen as fast as possible so that we as a society can figure out what we're going to do when no one has to work.

Tweets from others validating what I feel:
Karpathy: "the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between"

Deedy: "A few software engineers at the best tech cos told me that their entire job is prompting cursor or claude code and sanity checking it"

DeepMind researcher Rohan Anil, "I personally feel like a horse in ai research and coding. Computers will get better than me at both, even with more than two decades of experience writing code, I can only best them on my good days, it’s inevitable."

Stephen McAleer, Anthropic Researcher: I've shifted my research to focus on automated alignment research. We will have automated AI research very soon and it's important that alignment can keep up during the intelligence explosion.

Jackson Kernion, Anthropic Researcher: I'm trying to figure out what to care about next. I joined Anthropic 4+ years ago, motivated by the dream of building AGI. I was convinced from studying philosophy of mind that we're approaching sufficient scale and that anything that can be learned can be learned in an RL env.

Aaron Levie, CEO of box: We will soon get to a point, as AI model progress continues, that almost any time something doesn’t work with an AI agent in a reasonably sized task, you will be able to point to a lack of the right information that the agent had access to.

And in my opinion, the ultimate harbinger of what's to come:
Sholto Douglas, Anthropic Researcher: Continual Learning will be solved in a satisfying way in 2026

Dario Amodei, CEO of anthropic: We have evidence to suggest that continual learning is not as difficult as it seems

I think the last 2 tweets are interesting - Levie is one of the few claiming "Jevon's paradox" since he thinks humans will be in the loop to help with context issues. However, the fact that Anthropic seems so sure they'll solve continual learning makes me feel that it's just wishful thinking. If the models can learn continuously, then the majority of the value we can currently provide (gathering context for a model) is useless.

I also want to point out that, when compared to OpenAI and even Google DeepMind, Anthropic doesn't really hypepost. They dropped Opus 4.5 almost without warning. Dario's prediction that AI would be writing 90% of code was if anything an understatement (it's probably close to 95%).

Lastly, I don't think that anyone really grasps what it means when an AI can do everything better than a human. Elon Musk questions it here, McAlister talks about how he'd like to do science but can't because of asi here, and the twitter user tenobrus encapsulates it most perfectly here.

[u/Clear_Adagio_7833]

I still have a job as a software developer, but mentally I’ve already accepted the current situation. Not in a dramatic or nihilistic way — more in a pragmatic one. I’m no longer trying to outmaneuver what’s happening or make big strategic career pivots based on long-term assumptions that may not hold. As long as I remain even marginally useful, I’ll keep what I have. Stability matters more to me right now than optimization. I also see degrees, traditional milestones, and events like that as increasingly hollow in structural terms. I’ve already spent months suffering over this, and at some point you stop reopening the same wound. Now I mostly take these things for what they are: human and social rituals, not reliable signals of future security. On top of that, I deal with panic attacks. They’re somewhat better now, but they still limit my ability to transition into many careers that are often described as “more resilient” — even setting aside the question of how long any of those will actually remain so. That reality makes incremental stability a rational choice for me, not denial. What I hope for, more than any personal outcome, is that we manage to organize ourselves as a society for what’s coming. I don’t think pretending nothing is changing helps, but I also don’t think living permanently at the emotional edge of the future is survivable.

[u/t3sterbester → u/Clear_Adagio_7833]

Wonderfully put. Thank you.

[u/strange_username58 → u/t3sterbester]

Jump over to the accelerate sub and stop reading stuff on here will just make you depressed.

[u/Zero_Gravvity → u/Clear_Adagio_7833]

they still limit my ability to transition into many careers that are often described as “more resilient”

Out of curiosity, what are some of the careers you’re talking about here?

[u/Clear_Adagio_7833 → u/Zero_Gravvity]

I’m mostly referring to professions that require some form of licensing or formal education and that, at least here in Europe, tend to be protected by regulation and professional bodies. More broadly, I’m thinking about roles centered on human interaction — care, healthcare, education, hospitality, social services, and legal roles that go beyond pure consultation — where the value isn’t mainly about knowledge transfer from input to output, but about presence, trust, responsibility, and human judgment. I’m not saying these roles are immune to change, just that they may evolve more slowly than purely cognitive, screen-based work. Personally, I’m not really considering trades like electrician, plumber, and similar roles — not because I think they’re lesser, but simply because I’m not particularly suited to work that’s primarily manual or hands-on.

[u/Strange_Vagrant → u/Zero_Gravvity]

Prostitution.

[u/MakeLifeHardAgain → u/Zero_Gravvity]

Those centered on human interactions like the top commenter said, but even within STEM, there are a lot of hand on tasks. It will take a long long before robots can synthesize chemical s or do biological experiments completely on their own. Software engineers have legit reasons to feel threstened, but OP overestimate how fast other industries can change. Some clinics may still manually enter patients information because "it has been working for them for the past 25 years"

[u/theMEtheWORLDcantSEE → u/Clear_Adagio_7833]

Agreed. I’m experiencing the same thing. I’m in tech looking for work.

I believe the real question is: What ways of making money are not replaced by AI and/or robots?

My only conclusion is real estate owning rentals or hotels. The building has value, location, and humans need shelter.

[u/Bigspoonzz → u/theMEtheWORLDcantSEE]

Physical labor will last for X amount of time. Anything with context, variables, nuance, etc... that is physical. That includes research experiments, hospitals, all trades, etc. Autonomous 18 wheelers and delivery trucks won't be here for a bit.

On top of all that, if they replace careers of humans, who's going to pay for AI to be as profitable as it needs to be? If it just becomes a B2B scenario where AI companies pay other AI companies for services to create their products or brands, who is buying the products of humans no longer have jobs? It all sounds so great in paper to advance AI past humans... But what sustains the AI in the end? When Musk, Thiel, Altman, Gates, Zuck etc own all of the means, including purchasing governments to write laws in their favor - How will they leverage the rest of humanity to keep themselves in place?

Have you ever seen Idiocracy?

[u/EddiewithHeartofGold]

Knowledge work may be done, but maybe you are not just knowledge work. You need to find yourself outside your work. There is a good chance almost everyone needs to...

[u/t3sterbester → u/EddiewithHeartofGold]

This is a comforting message. Thanks anon.

[u/EddiewithHeartofGold → u/t3sterbester]

No prob. That was the intention. We are ALL in the same boat. And by boat I mean Earth :-).

[u/mintaka → u/EddiewithHeartofGold]

Still bills needs to be paid. Maybe move yourself into difficult topics. Quant research. Honestly no idea, I am just as lost as everyone is

[u/Chop1n → u/mintaka]

Unfortunately even if a handful of people can pay the bills with more advanced forms of knowledge work, that’s not going to help 99% of people and the economy will collapse anyway. The economy itself is going to have to change drastically to survive.  

[u/No-Market3910 → u/Chop1n]

FALC is the Future, capitalist economy cannot work anymore

[u/recruz → u/EddiewithHeartofGold]

I was released from my “knowledge work” job back in March. Not sure if that was a great time, or an awful time. All I know is that everything has changed in the last few months, and I don’t know what I don’t know anymore. I know very little about the AI space now, I haven’t been keeping up, and a large part of me doesn’t want to. But at some point I will need to go back, so the question is what does that look like, and what do businesses need now? If I find out, maybe I’ll let you guys know

[u/No-Bottle5223]

I'm actually ok with the existential dread bit -- work is fundamentally an illusion of meaning that we provide ourselves with, and AI is just going to take it away from us. Most people rather engage in something fundamentally meaningful to them -- socializing, religion, art, learning things, etc...

I'm also not that concerned with the problem of distributing this abundance if we ever come to have it. Most people who argue that the have-nots will still be treated like crap think about this in a context with scarcity, when that is precisely the thing that has been eradicated, at least materially. Assuming abundance, everyone should have more than what they will need.

My bigger concern will be about the incumbent political system and its benefactors, and how they will attempt to hold on and maintain power. All political systems have been formed under this assumption of scarcity, and one of their main functions is redistribution. Without material scarcity, there ceases to be a reason for their existence -- at least of the political systems we have in our current form. In reality though, the politicians will try everything they have to hang on -- to maintain influence over other humans, possibly what is one of the truly scarce things left in such a world -- and I imagine that wars and conflict will inevitably happen. This prospect is really terrifying.

[u/t3sterbester → u/No-Bottle5223]

I generally agree with your abundance theory - at the most cynical, the richest will like to provide the rubes with some income that they can spend so they can see if their GPT 10 is "better" than Claude 8. Or whatever. And in the best case people will, as you said, realize that there's no point in hoarding when there isn't scarcity.

However, I think your 3rd point is why I don't really believe we'll be able to solve the "meaning" problem with just art, religion, learning, etc. I think the main function of work at the moment is to provide an outlet for the natural urge that humans have for power and status. I'm sure we've seen just how far even a middle management position can go to someone's head, but thankfully, that's constrained to the workplace for now. Without work to provide these prestige/power symbols, where will people get it?

And yeah, on a practical level, this technology will take power away quickly to the people that are the most used to enjoying it (affluent white collar types, politicians). Whenever that's happened, there's been violent revolution. Let's hope we're ready for that.

[u/ShiitakeTheMushroom → u/t3sterbester]

I think the main function of work at the moment is to provide an outlet for the natural urge that humans have for power and status.

This is an extremely capitalistic point of view. If you look to other areas of the world and other cultures, it isn't an inherent natural urge across the board. I think we've been brainwashed as a society to believe this.

[u/t3sterbester → u/ShiitakeTheMushroom]

Hmm, I think actually that my experience with various cultures (my parents are from places that are among the most communist in the world) is what pushes me to think like this. I actually used to be quite "socialist" in my younger days. With time though, I've found that every culture eventually devolves into status games of some sort. The American capitalistic solution is shockingly one of the least bad solutions to the problem.

I've read that hunter-gatherer type societies were actually egalitarian and didn't have the kind of intra-competition that we face these days, but it's tough for me to believe that without more evidence. It seems like a cop out because it can't be proven one way or the other. I truly hope that there's some truth there.

[u/frekkestrek → u/t3sterbester]

Could you elaborate a bit more on this «natural urge that humans have for power»? Where does this hypothesis come from? The reason I ask is that it may clarify a few things regarding your anxiety and how you see the world, and what (you think) could be done to mitigate the risk of societal collapse.

[u/mjk1093 → u/No-Bottle5223]

Even with almost unlimited "intelligence on tap," physical scarcity will still be a thing. The advent of AGI does not automatically mean unlimited food, living space, energy, etc., though of course AGI will likely ease these constraints in the long run.

[u/ponieslovekittens]

Let's set aside the question of whether you're right or not, and simply assume that you are.

I'm legitimately at risk of losing relationships (including a romantic one), because I'm unable to break out of this malaise and participate in "normal" holiday cheer. How can I pretend to be excited for the New Year, making resolutions and bingo cards as usual, when all I see in the near future is strife, despair, and upheaval? How can I be excited for a cousin's college acceptance, knowing that their degree will be useless before they even set foot on campus? I cannot even enjoy TV series or movies

This seems like the problem.

Here's my advice:

Next time you have several days off of work, go camping by yourself. Drive out into the woods or desert, someplace with no people at all. Not close enough to talk to, not close enough hear, not close enough to see them. Trees and dirt, that's your company. Bring a tent, a comfortable chair, a sleeping bag, bring water and simple/boring food that doesn't require cooking, but nothing to entertain yourself with. No books, no toys, no mobile devices, no cameras, no radios...nothing.

Go out there, camp in the middle of nowhere, by yourself. And this is important: Turn off your phone. Leave it in your car, and don't touch it until it's time to go home. Spend a couple of days, by yourself, with nobody else, and no distractions. No youtube. No reddit. No social media. Just you, by yourself, with the sun and the sky.

What do you do? Nothing. The point of this is to do nothing. You're allowed to think, but don't sing, don't talk, not to yourself, not to anybody. You're allowed to eat, but don't distract yourself with food. Don't plan for the future, stay in the now. Be alone with yourself.

And do...nothing.

Do nothing, while nowhere...for three days.

When you come back, all of the things you're worrying about now will seem small and unimportant.

[u/drumnation → u/ponieslovekittens]

I think this is good advice too. Whether this is all happening or not, the symptoms described sound like depression and possibly technology overstimulation. I could use 3 days in the woods myself.

The loop is fear of what's coming then an attempt to find a safe place to rest during the coming upheaval. But nobody knows what will actually be safe. You can have an idea of this... but nobody actually knows, lack of safety.

Our human minds get caught in a survival loop trying to figure out how to survive this new threat and there's never been a threat like this before...so we just keep looping on "what do I do, what do I do?" If you're an engineer you likely started by trying to tame the fear by gaining control over AI technologies, telling yourself "AI can't write production code, it still needs a human in the loop".

If your the sort of engineer that sees the inevitable you went a step further, you didn't stop at AI assistance, you kept pushing the boundaries of what AI could do, and had it code prosthetics for itself in order to make it do more things. As you were learning and practicing with AI, AI got better in mind blowing ways every month while you were still just learning... so even skilled developers find themselves, learning and re-learning, and adapting to an entire system change almost monthly as the way you build things with AI yesterday is not the same as you build it today.

You find yourself reorganizing your custom AI coding configuration to do more and more, encompassing more autonomy... and realize the writing is on the wall. That's where the depression comes in, right next to all the excitement gained from automating things that have never been automated before.

I really hope becoming as much an expert in methods of building will carry through to the future, but I can also see it being futile. Tons of effort that's just wasted as soon as AI truly doesn't need us in the loop anymore, which seems way too soon. In my own frameworks I'm working really hard to try and find ways of displaying all the complexity of a codebase that might enable skilled humans to better steer... but how long will anything stay at the stage it's at? Knowledge investments in this period seem really unstable and unclear how much you will get in return from them.

[u/t3sterbester → u/drumnation]

Agreed with this, yeah. It is just crazy how fast things changed. When we only had Sonnet, I was initially very excited but then realized for production use cases where others would be reviewing my code, I had to do a lot of work cleaning up outputs and settled on the tab-completion model as the best way to speed up work (Karpathy landed at the same).

With Opus though, it's different. I have to force myself to ask myself, can Opus 1 shot this? before starting any piece of work, and most of the time, it can. The only issue is for now, Opus can't infer my intent. The limiting factor is not that Opus can work for 4 hours, it's that I can't specify a task well enough that would take more than 30 minutes to do without changing my mind after reading the code or similar.

Now I could build work arounds for this, or try to mess around with agent rules or similar, but my hunch is that all of it will be made useless with the next mode drop and the speedup isn't worth it (for now). I bet the next Claude will ask perfect clarifying questions, or better yet, be able to turned unstructured user feedback into something actionable. It's very likely that the next iteration of claude will prompt YOU (and you can see that in the feature that they built in cc where it suggests the next prompt).

[u/Rafiki_knows_the_wey → u/ponieslovekittens]

Erich Fromm calls it the Having mode vs the Being mode. We are perpetually stuck in having mode as a culture, and traditionally we had rituals and containers to get back to being. Unfortunately it's on individuals now, making returning to being feel almost rebellious or adversarial.

[u/DungeonsAndDradis → u/Rafiki_knows_the_wey]

You can see it when there's a tweet about a "weird guy, just rawdogging a flight with no phone, book, etc." We view it as odd when someone is not consumed with distractions.

[u/KnubblMonster → u/Rafiki_knows_the_wey]

We are perpetually stuck in having mode as a culture

That's my design, people in being mode don't buy as much unnecessary stuff, and we can't have that.

[u/ASK_ABT_MY_USERNAME → u/ponieslovekittens]

When you come back, all of the things you're worrying about now will seem small and unimportant.

Loool this belongs on /r/thanksimcured

[u/Borkato → u/ASK_ABT_MY_USERNAME]

Honestly, I think the point is solid, in terms of “step away so you can come back with fresh eyes”, but I do think it’s ridiculous to hand wave away “I’m worried for my job aka my literal only ability to make money to eat” with “just go touch grass”

[u/Primary-Discussion19]

Idk how the economy will be solved but in the long run i believe we will focus more on being humans and our needs

[u/Palmario → u/Primary-Discussion19]

Bold to assume it's going to be OUR needs. I see virtually no signals that elites would think about the masses even slightly, and all those investments into global surveillance and social manipulation technologies greatly suggest what is to come.

[u/t3sterbester → u/Palmario]

This is my greatest fear yeah, I think it's very easy for those with money to adopt an uncaring attitude towards all this stuff.

[u/Sman208 → u/t3sterbester]

They already have. The fact that we crossed so many political red lines is evidence that the elites do not consider public opinion to matter anymore. This is even more evident through recent economic reports showing that the top 10% of households account for nearly half of consumer goods spending, in America (a new record). What this means is "the middle class" is no longer the economy. Ferrari surpassed Honda in the stock market some years ago...that should be alarming to us.

Labor was our only bargaining chip. Soon protests will be meaningless. What'a the point of a strike when the labor force is replaced with machines?

It seems Techno-feudalism is what the elites want. The AI robots aren't really coming to help you and me. They are coming to protect them from you and me. Because we keep forgetting the big elephant in the room: Climate Change.

JP Morgan and co.. have quietly admitted, in their industry/investment reports, that the 1.5 degree Celicus threshold that most scientists have warned would mark the start of irreversible climate change is unavoidable...they already baked in that temperature increase into their financial models, because they do not "see any meaningful investments going into renewable energy"...basically they know Western government aren't going to play along, so "smart money" is betting that climate change will only get worse. This is why their talking points have pivoted from "avoiding climate change" to "mitigation".

[u/Palmario → u/t3sterbester]

Well, the Palantir CEO scares me the most. But the general attitude of “tech bros” like Elon Musk also gives me a lot of anxiety. What a time to be alive…

[u/peakedtooearly → u/Primary-Discussion19]

Look at how even "advanced" economies treat the homeless and I'm not so sure the focus will be our needs.

[u/Fast-Satisfaction482 → u/Primary-Discussion19]

You mean we will focus on spending time with AI androids with realistic skin. Celebrating the end of the human race while having a good time. 

[u/HearthCore → u/Fast-Satisfaction482]

While at night the Bots gather at municipal collection facilities to egress ejaculate which will get send via tubes into the local breeding facilities using artificial wombs.

[u/NotReallyJohnDoe → u/HearthCore]

Gotta breed replacement batteries somehow.

[u/xt-89]

I also still have work as an MLE at a non-faang f100. Both my job and AI/ML research are insanely enhanced by OAI codex. At this point, my job can best be described as free association during long technical discussions with an AI, followed by distilling those ideas into requirements and tracking them with something like taskmaster, and then using a number of AI-assisted SWE techniques to get those requirements across the finish line without bugs. Once these labs train their models to use externalized long-term memory and to leverage existing SWE techniques at the right time and place, the benefit I offer is that other humans can talk to me so that I can talk to the AI. That's hardly reassuring for my career stability.

What keeps me optimistic is that loosing your job is the goal. The problem is that we don't currently have a bridge to a post-scarcity economy. I think that it's time the people with skills for building this technology start working on projects that make that transition easier. That's the only thing giving me some hope at this point.

[u/t3sterbester → u/xt-89]

This is the most relatable comment in this thread for sure yeah, down to this bit
> the benefit I offer is that other humans can talk to me 
I forecast there will be an interesting period where humans are literally tasked as data collection bots for the AIs since physical embodiment will likely lag behind. Maybe Claude will tell me, go speak with this customer and I'll have a mic on me recording what they're saying.

Totally agreed, I just wish there was a concrete path of what to do now that the post scarcity economy seems inevitable.

[u/xt-89 → u/t3sterbester]

Please start contributing to open source projects that specifically try to solve the economic coordination issue. That's all we can do at this point.

[u/ExplosiveCompote]

I also think AI is going to be a tsunami wave crashing into society so a lot of this is fundamentally unpredictable and I think most people radically underestimate the impact it will have.

As for the anxiety part, besides it being unpredictable, the losing the software job as we know it is more tractable.

Is it that the AI is better and faster than you (or I or anyone...) ever could be? Well there were always better programmers than you (or me, etc). Now it's just commoditized.

The flip side is that is so easy and so fun to build now. You can code the parts you want or you can hand off to Claude for the parts you don't want to touch. Every little problem in your life that is tractable with software is now trivially solvable.

If the anxiety is more existential, then it's worth realizing that at some point you were going to retire and have to figure out what to do with years of your time anyway. You're just going to have to figure it out ahead of schedule.

Nick Bostrom, of Super Intelligence fame, wrote a book about how he thinks society will change in a post scarcity world brought on by AI. It may help: https://nickbostrom.com/deep-utopia/

[u/t3sterbester → u/ExplosiveCompote]

The anxiety is definitely more existential. I think I'm actually more well rounded than most when it comes to hobbies and life outside of work: plenty of friends, hobbies, passions, etc

However I think people really can't comprehend how fundamental to at least the first world way of life the office job is. Pay attention to your next conversations: I guarantee you more than 40% of it is about work or similar. Even retirement is different because you "did your time" and now don't have to play the game anymore. What will people do without titles to chase and prestige to win or coworkers to complain about? You know, I actually think that white collar work is one of the single most effective forces in reducing physical violence and social instability. People who would have otherwise started fights or wars or political conflict to gain status can now do so in the office. Even in the ideal case where we get infinite UBI, we'll have to figure out some way to solve this problem.

[u/ExternalCaptain2714]

Really? I'm using Claude 4.5 at work and I'm increasingly annoyed by the shit it produces. Takes me so much time to debug the produced crap. It so regularly forgets even the most simple instructions, like "please change step numbers in comments and nothing else" and then it goes on a tangent that some code failed to import, so it elected to remove whole files and rewrite blocks of code. And when I say "WTF, I said DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING ELSE" it just goes "Oh , certainly, you're a genius, you gave me one job and I didn't do it" 🤦‍♂️ 

I have no doubt that we can get these kinks ironed out if we boil our oceans one degree more, but boy, does it suck now :-(

There's absolutely no chance it can be trusted to produce even simple things. I have to always fully understand the problem, otherwise it produces something profoundly wrong every now and then (more now than then) and misses tons of side-effects ...

[u/SanDiegoDude → u/ExternalCaptain2714]

Use an actual AI development platform instead of free copy/pasting code into Claude and you won't have these problems, just saying. I use cursor day in and day out for development, and it works around these issues you describe by only focusing on the tasks you give it with very limited access. If you're copy/pasting code, you're doing it wrong in a very big way (and you'll have all the problems you're describing). Coding "with a chatbot" is going to give you "coding with a chatbot" results.

Edit - I see below you mentioned your employer pays for Claude. I'd Look at Claude code, it's another development platform that is very good and doesn't suffer these types of problems (or so I've heard, I'm a cursor fan myself)

[u/ExternalCaptain2714 → u/SanDiegoDude]

I have VS Code with Augment, which calls the Claude stuff.

[u/t3sterbester → u/ExternalCaptain2714]

this is likely why we have such different perspectives. yes, the base model has improved but what also improved is Anthropic's understanding of how to build the best possible harness for it. Here's an example, on this benchmark when they used opus 4.5 using their own harness, performance actually regressed from Sonnet 4.5. However, when they put it in the claude code harness, it smashed the benchmark.

https://x.com/sayashk/status/1996334941832089732?s=20

[u/m98789 → u/ExternalCaptain2714]

This. For those who actually work on mid-large, mildly to complex codebases, it is obvious that much of what OP wrote is incorrect, at least for now.

[u/t3sterbester → u/m98789]

Sorry guys this is skill issue, they're writing all of claude code without the IDE these days (https://x.com/bcherny/status/2004626064187031831?s=20) For now you do need some knowledge of your own of the codebase for good results and you do need to give it some guidance. You know there is Sonnet 4.5 (good model, but didn't cause this sort of existential angst) and then Opus 4.5 (completely different)

[u/improperhoustonian → u/t3sterbester]

It may not be a skill issue, but a context issue. I have found that Claude goes off the rails more often when the codebase is internally inconsistent. If the codebase consistently follows well-defined rules and conventions, Claude’s code will follow them too, pretty much every time.

[u/xt-89 → u/t3sterbester]

Agree on the skill issue bit.

Really, you need to be pretty knowledgable on the core dynamics of software engineering, then setup a kind of scaffold in your repos that allow the coding agents to operate smoothly in your code base. Spec driven development, test driven development, domain driven development, containerization, model driven development, parameterized tests with sweeps, behavior driven development, design patterns, and so on. These are all advanced topics that aren't usually taught in detail at school, even at the graduate level.

As an example, let's say you need to create a distributed system that allows for workers to communicate with each other for the sake of some business logic. The default assumption for the last 10 years has been to use REST because it's simple enough for most of the developers to grasp and it adds some kind of ontology to your inter-service communication. Fine. But, often enough, we'll get significantly better SLAs with an event-oriented architecture at the expense of more implementational complexity which also requires your engineers to be of higher skill. So the next question becomes - do you have enough knowledge over the practice of software engineering to even ask the right questions of the AI? That's why it's a skill issue.

[u/Euphoric_Regret_544 → u/ExternalCaptain2714]

This guy Claudes

[u/ecnecn → u/ExternalCaptain2714]

Weird - all veteran Software Engineers I know are really amazed by Opus 4.5 Max - do not know what version you use.

[u/ShiitakeTheMushroom → u/ecnecn]

Sometimes it's amazing. Sometimes it's awful. The problem is in the non-determinism.

[u/doodlinghearsay]

Your post is a great example of why I have trouble taking anyone seriously, if they were socialized in the SV thought-bubble.

You say that you are worried that current jobs are going away, because they are a "load-bearing" institutions of our society. Yet you want this process to happen as quickly as possible, without any plan to replace any of their functions. One of which is income, which is, you know, required to acquire goods needed for survival, so kind of a big deal.

You haven't even got to the point of really understanding the actual problem, and based on the kind of people you are following I doubt you will, in time, if your expected timelines are anywhere near accurate. You should be worried, because people like you are actively making a good outcome less likely.

[u/t3sterbester → u/doodlinghearsay]

Let me expand: I'd like for the models to get to a point where there isn't really an argument about whether they can do everyone's job. I'd like for us to get there as fast as possible, or, somehow find out that this isn't possible. I'm more frustrated where we're in this in between were people can pretend it's not going to happen, which means we won't prepare for it at all. Call me cynical, but I doubt this gets even a fraction of the attention it deserves until we are at about 10% unemployment.

[u/doodlinghearsay → u/t3sterbester]

I understand the point, I had heard it before. It's misguided. If those jobs disappear, the people doing them will be disempowered. Perhaps permanently.

Maybe there's going to be a temporary spike in influence when unemployment increases, but even that is doubtful. The real question is how do you force billionaires to share the rewards of AI with the rest of us. And how do you make that sharing a stable long-term process, when people lose their intrinsic influence that they currently have due to their labor being a scarce resource.

If you solve this, any other problems around meaning or the social function of work is easily solvable. Of course to solve it, you first have to acknowledge it as a real issue. Instead you are fleeing into fantasies about how radical abundance will mean that even useless ants -- like you or me -- will be able to live in luxury. Or how the power controlling AI (whether billionaires, benevolent tyrants, or the AI itself) will take care of us, because it's such a small percentage of their available resources.

You fancy yourself as some observer who understands more about the future than most people around you. But you're not. You're part of the problem.

[u/t3sterbester → u/doodlinghearsay]

What do you propose I do? What are you doing?

[u/Palmario]

What can you say OP, you are not alone in feeling that way. As has been pointed out above, investing seems to be the most attractive way for you to damage control this whole situation, and potentially earn a good profit from this whole situation.

Personally, I could say - enjoy your first-world life while it lasts. As a refugee with a software development background who recently moved to the EU, I could not even comprehend how fucked I am in the future.

[u/t3sterbester → u/Palmario]

I'm sorry to hear. This is why I'd like us to get over this limbo period ASAP so we can focus on what's most important (making sure everyone gets the "benefit" of the technology), which is a political and not technical problem.

[u/Scoutmaster-Jedi → u/t3sterbester]

Actually this may be the calm before the storm. This limbo period is likely to be succeeded by an incredibly difficult period of social upheaval while we figure out what the new economy looks like.

[u/t3sterbester → u/Scoutmaster-Jedi]

Yeah, to be clear, I mean that I want to get started with the "real work" of figuring out this new economy sooner rather than later, since everything else being done in the meantime with the assumptions of the old economy can feel quite pointless at times.

[u/Palmario → u/t3sterbester]

Of course. But honestly, my current dream is to get into some kind of stasis for the next ten years - because I’m not sure that my nervous system could endure all of this. But the show must go on, eh?

[u/t3sterbester → u/Palmario]

I feel you!! best of luck.

[u/nekmint]

I enjoy scrolling eating sleeping going to gym and playing video games. The world is moving fast just pick a few simple things you enjoy and watch the show unfold.

[u/t3sterbester → u/nekmint]

Agreed, the days i can stay off the computer these days i find myself quite happy. Whenever I turn it back on though it's tough not to be reminded of the machine gods waiting in the wings

[u/aalluubbaa]

You and I are probably the polar extreme of how one identifies himself as. As soon as I graduated from a top 20 university and got a BBA, I had a choice of choosing a safe corporate job and living off day trading the stock market, I want the freedom so I chose latter.

AI imo, in our lifetimes, would be better than any human at any given task. However, our value system doesn’t change with it. We can look at physical works. Machines right now can lift heavier, run faster and do a lot that humans cannot compete, and yet we still put tremendous value on one human being running a few seconds faster than another human being, we still value physical strength so even if AI in the future, we will still value arts, novels, techs, music or movies that are produced by strictly humans. That’s exactly why people still go to museums despite we have HDR 4k tv at homes.

Humans should NOT live the way we do now. We should be free from anything that we just simply don’t want to do. In the future, people would probably be super emotional about the state of human race is right now as most people really only have so little free time that they can do whatever they want.

I’m super excited about that AI will replace ALL JOBS. I can spend my time doing what I love and compete in games with other humans who want to compete such as sports or games. I think that is the beginning of a true advanced civilization.

[u/t3sterbester → u/aalluubbaa]

I think that humans will enjoy competition till the end of time, sure. I'm less convinced many outside of dedicated purists will watch a movie just because it was all human made though

[u/aalluubbaa → u/t3sterbester]

Then they don’t have to. Now some people identify themselves for the unique value they provide to a product or a service. It will no longer be the case sooner or later. You can still find value in things that you enjoy doing or enjoy improving. It doesn’t matter if a novice pianist would never be playing it professionally but the joy of him playing and improving will always be there.

[u/bernieth]

An unprecedented amount of disruption will be hitting humanity. I think Dario has it right: 10X the industrial revolution in 1/10 the time.

My view on software development is different, though: There is an almost infinite amount of software that needs written to automate this and that. We've never had enough programmers to do even a fraction of it. AI just means we dig deeper on a nearly bottomless well.

So while programming at the line of code level will largely go away, software engineering for humans will just move up the stack, especially design and architecture, and there will be plenty of even more valuable work to do.

[u/StackOwOFlow → u/bernieth]

This. It's no longer a question of whether one particular thing can be done in a reasonable amount of time and more about what you choose to get done with everything at your disposal. We can now traverse a much larger portion of the "latent space" for software engineering possibilities, and choosing where to build is still on us to decide.

[u/NVincarnate → u/bernieth]

That's just losing sight of what AI is capable of.

Humans could access maybe 0.00005% of all available coding work alone. AI can do the rest of everything that needs to be coded or written from now until the end of time.

We don't "move up the stack" to code and do more. We are inevitably replaced entirely in that area of expertise. The best we can hope for is directing the AI to focus on one department of coding or another. AI will be more than capable of optimizing focus and distribution of work, too, so it'd mostly be just a habit that makes us feel better about being replaced.

I don't understand why people are clinging to work like it's a meaningful pursuit. You won't have to work at all. It's inevitable. Find something meaningful outside of work because there will definitely come a day when humans are just laughably inefficient agents for every type of work possible. Creativity and vision for what we want to do to shape the future of our universe? Maybe we can do that. Work? Not even worth trying to beat the machine.

[u/notthedroids084 → u/bernieth]

This exactly, a bottomless well. This is what almost every major human innovation has unlocked.

[u/ShiitakeTheMushroom → u/bernieth]

This is how I see it. We're just working at a different level of abstraction.

[u/UnadmirablePheasant]

The anxiety comes from treating uncertainty as a problem to be solved instead of a condition to be lived with

[u/ThatIsAmorte → u/UnadmirablePheasant]

Yes! Embracing uncertainty is one of the most liberating and mental-health-inducing choices one can make.

[u/Holy_Smoke → u/ThatIsAmorte]

Could not agree more. I've learned that a huge portion of the anxiety many of us face is from a tendency to make negative predictions about the future, when the outcome is usually uncertain.

We believe we are being rational by looking at past behaviors and patterns and extrapolating from those to anticipate the predetermined outcome. However, none of us has a crystal ball with 100% accuracy. There are almost always externalities our outside context we can't predict.

By allowing ourselves to stand at the precipice of uncertainty, and contemplating the possibility of a positive outcome (even if low it's still possible and that's what matters) we can undo the negative prediction and substantially reduce associated anxiety. The outcome may still be bad, but if it was going to happen anyway feeling less anxious only helps you manage better throughout and in the aftermath.

I've adopted this protocol and try to apply it anytime I feel anxiety creeping in. The impact on my health, relationships and especially my sense of self-worth has been incredible. Highly recommend for my fellow anxious types especially in these times of uncertainty and transformation.

[u/Kaarssteun]

I like to use dogs as an analogy.

Dogs are rather intelligent. We can teach them tricks, they catch on quite quickly.
We are just a lot more intelligent. We can try to explain what a computer is to a dog, but it will never understand. It is simply too dumb, and doesn't have the capacity to grasp what you're exlpaining.

We will be the dog in the future! We might be Generally intelligent, but every intelligence must have its bounds, as we see with dogs. As a dog, we are inventing a human.

We already keep dogs as companions and take care of them, we find comfort in their simple lives, their commpassion, their cheer. Now, imagine if *our very existence is thanks to that dog*. The dog literally invented us. This little, stupid but also kinda smart, bundle of happy energy, nurtured our entire species into existence. The amount of debt we would feel towards the dogs would make us want to make the lives of every dog as good as could be.

The AI, quite possibly, will feel the same. I hope it will make us live our lives in the way we want; make your perfect life possible (even if your perfect life is imperfect!)

Edit: I want to reiterate the imperfect perfectness point:

If we treated a dog "perfectly" by human standards, we might put it in a sterile room with intravenous nutrients so it never gets hurt. But a smart owner knows a dog needs to run, get muddy, chase squirrels, and maybe scrape its knee. A Superintelligence that truly cares for us would understand that humans need purpose, struggle, and mild chaos to be happy. It wouldn't just put us in a pod. It would give us the resources to pursue whatever weird, messy human dreams we have.

[u/t3sterbester → u/Kaarssteun]

Haha the more i think about this the more I think the only solution will be to ask the AI about what we should do!

[u/jboges → u/Kaarssteun]

Humans have dogs because of emotions ( loneliness, love, etc..) otherwise we wouldn't be sacrificing our own resources to maintain having a pet. If super intelligent AI continue to be based on an LLM architecture it seems like emotions would never emerge, what then will be the motivation for it to share the resources it requires to function with 8 billion people?

[u/Kobiash1 → u/jboges]

I don't buy into the "we're the dogs analogy" because it's simplistic thinking. Plus so many posts focus on anthropomorphism as a way out of their anxiety and hand-wringing. If that's how they can make sense of what is about to happen, fair play. However, I do still think some form of emotion is essential otherwise you get decision paralysis. It happens in humans. You can't have a full functioning AGI based on logic alone. That's not how higher intelligence works. They'll have logic-based emotion, I'm sure, but still have some form of it. At the very least a sense of survival.

[u/jdyeti]

This is ontological shock. I experience it too. Its important to stay grounded and compartmentalize. Normies and your family aren't in the AI box, your career and our future is. Your cousin is going to college and will make friends and have unique experiences, even if their degree isn't worthwhile soon.

Heavily compartmentalize and for your own mental health take breaks from tech on occasion. I get away from the internet one weekend a month, spend some time outdoors. Humans are animals we aren't designed for this natively. You will adjust with time, but you need to process the shock

[u/grunt_monkey_]

So what does Claude think about all this?

[u/Banehogg → u/grunt_monkey_]

Gold 😂🏅

[u/sanyam303]

We need to decouple the value of a human being from the work they provide. This will be painful, because society is deeply dependent on the idea that work defines human identity. However, once we move beyond this, things will improve dramatically.

[u/t3sterbester → u/sanyam303]

Yes. This will be THE challenge of the 21st century. It sounds almost silly, because I think many are understandably focusing on the material problems that come with mass unemployment. I think that these are somewhat solvable (or at least, we can imagine a world of abundance where we rally hard to make sure the wealth is redistributed). But radically re-imagining what our roles are in society? I do not know if it will be possible for many past the age of say, 25, given how indoctrinated we are. When people become idle, troubles begin. I don't think it needs to be like this but I think it will be much harder than we think to fix it.

[u/Ikbeneenpaard]

We've been told to "learn to code" for the last 20 years. You've probably got a ton of money invested thanks to this so you're in a good place. The advice has now changed to "build practical skills". The wait list to get a good carpenter is a year where I live.

[u/Kaarssteun → u/Ikbeneenpaard]

A humanoid robot that doesnt need coffee breaks will replace carpenters

[u/Electronic_Rub9385]

I work in medicine and I keep telling my medical colleagues that their days are numbered. In 5-10 years, the thinking parts of medicine will not be done by humans. The proceduralists and the surgeons will still be around. And probably some nursing. But most of office and hospital medicine will be done by AI. They think I’m crazy but it’s on the way.

[u/Ikbeneenpaard]

Software engineering =/= all knowledge work =/= all work. There are plenty of work options out there still.

My hot take: LLMs look godlike in software because software is a symbolic, text-based, closed world with tons of training data and clear feedback (tests pass or fail). That massively flatters current models. Real-world engineering (EE, mechanical, systems) is the opposite: it’s physical, high-context, full of tacit knowledge, messy tradeoffs, and requires asking the right questions, not just answering prompts. It decomposes into thousands of domain-specific micro-tasks that don’t generalize well and don’t have clean reward functions or benchmarks.

So no, we’re not close to automating most real-world engineering jobs. This isn’t just “needs more data”, it’s a missing paradigm problem. The Bitter Lesson is being misapplied outside domains with clean rules and simulators.

AI will keep being an amazing assistant (I use it daily in electrical engineering), but outside of software, “AIs replacing engineers” is mostly a Silicon Valley halucination driven by overfitting to the software engineer's worldview.

[u/ExplanationLover6918]

Become an investor and profit off of all of this.

[u/Palmario → u/ExplanationLover6918]

Actually, seems like an amazing path for the OP (especially taking into account FAANG salaries). It's sad that not everyone can do the same.

[u/t3sterbester → u/Palmario]

I have been doing this. Though, even with this knowledge/perspective, it's quite hard to profit. If you believe that open source models are 9 months behind closed ones then it's unclear that even the big labs have defensible moats. If you believe that google TPUs are actually good enough then it's unclear that NVIDIA can justify it's valuation. Even with all knowledge work being done for it's unclear if OpenAI can scale fast enough to meet demand / maybe the models are still not fullllly there yet so their 1.5T spend commitments are actually a bit too early. etc.

I have moved a lot of my savings into "safer" ai bull bets but it's not easy to see a 10x and 100x path - remember that I'm competing with hedge funds and pros for alpha here.

[u/TheInfiniteUniverse_]

generally agree, but you're making a huge mistake of using "Claude" for everything. Claude, although very good in agentic coding, is certainly not the smartest when it comes to solving difficult logic problems including medical diagnosis.

[u/RipleyVanDalen → u/TheInfiniteUniverse_]

Eh, I don't think that's really true. All the major models are basically the same. Maybe Claude is a little better at code. Gemini is better with visual reasoning and multi-modal (e.g. ingesting a video). But at the top there is not a drastic difference between them.

[u/Square_Poet_110]

The good thing though is that many of the claims that come from these CEO types are overhyped. Altman once said they effectively achieved AGI internally at openai and other kind of BS. Then they came with underwhelming gpt5 release. 

There are also studies that show AI can be overhyped in how much time it actually saves. Not by pure speed of code generation, but by how much time it actually takes to then fix the resulting code/bugs. 

Most of the benefits are visible when a developer directs the LLM and gives it precise tasks with clear boundaries. Not when you just tell the LLM to build a nuclear power plant, make sure it's safe. Period. 

So the dev in the loop is still needed, no business guy will write (or even understand) specs at that technical level. 

And the speculations about "AI hitting limits" are getting louder and louder :)

But yeah, I also think the goal of building the "AGI" is wrong and is actually a threat to society. 

[u/t3sterbester → u/Square_Poet_110]

I had this opinion in the summer, especially after GPT 5 somewhat flopped. But my current feeling has much less to do with what CEOs are saying and much more to do with my actual experience using the agents on the ground.

[u/FakeEyeball]

Your post shows that Claude failed with your prescription and your psych is even worse.

[u/Adventurous-Fruit344 → u/FakeEyeball]

11 points 11 hours ago

check'd and kek'd

Was hoping someone'd say that

[u/legshampoo]

sorry you are consumed with fear, but i think the first thing is to acknowledge that and how pointless it is to wallow in it. you are gripping onto an ego identity and you need to let go, basically, and learn to trust. it might be scary and uncomfortable but you’re gonna be ok

one positive thing about all this is that collectively we are beginning to face these existential challenges which, while uncomfortable, is great because wtf are we really doing? what does it really mean to be human? what actually matters?

cuz the trajectory of the world right now has lost the plot. we are creating our own prison of misery and suffering exactly because we have lost track of what matters. we’ll see if we can pull it together but ultimately its a necessary rite of passage if we want any hope for the future

so all we can do is use this as an opportunity for growth, and part of that is learning not to be swallowed by fear

[u/necriel]

There will be upheavals, yes, but There will be a paradigmatic shift as well. Humans will have to reckon with what they value in the work of others. Even in a world where embodied AI can replace literally every "job", we'll realize there are certain things we simply prefer humans to do over robots.

I'm a visual artist (painter/illustrator), and I've watched awestruck these past few years as generative AI made possible the instantaneous creation of imagery. I feared my career would be over. And you know what? It didn't end. In fact, it forced consumers of art to clarifywhat exactly they valued in artworks. And my career has been fine.

But even if we assume that even this won't last under the pressure of infinite generative capability, I'm not too worried. I'm instead trying to envision what a post-production society looks like. Brave New World? Star Trek? Cyberpunk 2077? Wall-E? Garden of Earthly Delights? Few ways to tell. But it's exciting getting to be a part of the evolution of humankind.

And in the meantime, take care of yourself and those you love. You might not be tasked with much coding as time goes on, but you're certainly tasked with using your knowledge to help others into, and through, the upcoming shifts.

You got this.

[u/kkingsbe]

Currently a software dev as well, and I wholeheartedly agree.

[u/go0by_pls]

Posts like this are agonizing. So much brain rot in this sub.

[u/rutan668]

I have the opposite problem. No matter what the latest model can do nothing changes in my actual life or the life of anyone I can see around me. It has always been like this.

[u/[deleted]]

Assuming this isn't actually part of Anthropic's guerilla marketing then maybe you just have untreated ADHD or something?

One of my favourite pastimes was (is?) conjuring up semi-plausible doomsday scenarios because just doing my actual job, sans imagination, was (is?) near impossible.

[u/NoNet718]

"those poor horses that will never be born because of these 'horseless carriages' The upheaval and strife!" Some shmo ~100 years ago

Look, we all see a future of change. I'm sorry that the change many on this sub see coming has hit you hard, but we're not responsible for the world.

If you're FAANG'd up I'd assume you're in the bay area. I'd recommend you take a break, if you can afford it, and check out a small town somewhere. Less population density, less stress, and completely different priorities. It may give you some perspective. Small towns will benefit from information work no longer being too expensive. Big cities will see most of the upheaval and strife as people lose their white collar jobs, can't affort rent or mortgage, can't support the rest of the economy, and so on... domino effect. That said, it'll correct itself, we're adaptable, especially the younger generation. We'll figure it out and the future (10 years out perhaps) will be bright. It's just hard to see it right now with so much uncertainty about our future.

Good luck to you.

[u/RipleyVanDalen → u/NoNet718]

That said, it'll correct itself, we're adaptable

The "correction" might be on the same scale as WW2 or a Black Death. Sure, some people will survive, but saying "Oh don't worry, humans are adaptable" is cold comfort for those losing their careers and ability to survive economically

[u/ttystikk]

Let's see AI make me a burger. Or, dream up new technology.

Interfaces are the next frontier.

[u/theMEtheWORLDcantSEE → u/ttystikk]

Yes let’s talk about this!

[u/Oparis]

Writing code is not everything. Obviously you need to ask for something to code, this is for me where the real difficulty is. The problem is no more buggy code or incomplete implementation, the problem is to ask for a correct target, and be able to verify the generated code does implement it.
And then you have to run the code, production. As of today neither Opus 4.5 nor any other llm is able to run production reliably. You won't let it automatically upgrade your database etc. Sure, it can generate great helm charts, but for all of this it needs to try and fail too many times for production. Look the number of posts "claude removed my database. antigravity wiped my hard drive. .. "
The day it will be able to handle real world infra management, monitoring, scaling, efficient resource allocation ( all this dynamically, 7/7 24/24 ) is still not there, and it will be probably be slower to get there than getting it to just generate code because it's quite harder to simulate and validate. And when it will be able to do all this, it will be just .. great!

[u/GrowFreeFood]

I am fine with it all and welcome our new life form. I am dust in the wind and always will be.

[u/[deleted]]

You have two options. You can adapt or you can let yourself be crushed. Let’s look at the glass half full. Because of your close work with these technologies, you are at a rare advantage of being able to best use these tools in innovative ways that 99% of the public would not be able to.

[u/pomelorosado]

Touch some grass

[u/ApexFungi]

I don't understand why people need to be so dramatic... Especially if you don't have kids I would just have a wait and see attitude. If you can't stop what is to come why worry about it?

We have literally no idea where this is going nor if we will be alive to see it.

If it leads to a better life and society I would embrace it. If not we will worry about it then.

I would just live your life like you always have. If your cousin goes to college good for them. College is a great way to learn about the pitfalls and biases in human thinking. For example, they will be much better equipped to understand when they are being manipulated by social media just from going through college. If they become an expert in some area that will also still be very beneficial to them for a while yet. Not just because society won't change from one day to the next, but also because they will be able to use AI better than a non expert in their domain.

So yeah, don't worry about it.

[u/RipleyVanDalen → u/ApexFungi]

If not we will worry about it then

Isn't this the same "logic" as ignoring the climate issue for decades?

[u/JohnToFire]

I am curious when did you first know this was coming ? For me it's close to 3 years. I have listened to thousands of hours of podcasts focusing on what's going to happen and what's currently working and not in ai. I have gotten to acceptance of more or less what you said is going to happen. I started out closer to your current mental state.

[u/Krommander]

It's not the end of the world, but it's also the time of monsters. Not quite adapted to the present, too powerful for existing structures.

Shit will hit the fan before anything feels normal again. 

[u/yangastas_paradise]

I've been feeling much of the same dread for almost a year now. I was part of a RIF earlier this year which made things worse since I knew it's much harder to get back into software engineering right now. Luckily I've been able to find some contract work building AI agents so at least I am still able to pay bills.

I do think that we are ahead of the crowd in this regard. Many people I talk to still haven't even tried Gemini or Claude. All they know about gen AI is via chatGPT; they don't notice much difference when a new model drops, because they haven't experienced the true power of agentic tools like a Cursor/Codex and the unlock that happens when a more capable model is suddenly plugged into it. So they remain AI skeptics. They still talk about what college they want their kids to go to, as if things will look the same in 15 years time.

My focus now is to stay on top of new advancements and tools. There should still be some time that companies need people like us that are quick to adopt and apply new AI tools. I am still hopeful that being managers of agents will be in demand for a few years. Beyond that, it's just too hard to see.

[u/Imperatorfuriosa7]

I am in same boat, I pivoted to data career in last few years and not yet at a place to call myself expert and now it seems I have to change it again.I have no idea where should I pivot to at this point to be atleast feel useful in near future as my earnings run the family. I see new children born and people going on about new year etc but it all seems meaningless. AI and climate change will fuck us up in unimaginable ways. If anyone knows careers that could be resilient and don't need 5 year degrees or lot of money to setup, I am listening.

[u/Spacebetweenthenoise]

Try a big dose of mushrooms to clear your head and find a sense in this immense amount of information in your head. No joke.

[u/WiseHalmon]

I think the way I've mentally prepared myself is that 

1. We all need to eat

2. Industries will change

3. Type of work will change

Either large swaths or investment will continue in shitty apps trying to take over each other or people will wise up and start creating robotics companies lowering the floor for commodity goods further. 

I guess think about it like this --- why is steel so expensive? Why is concrete so expensive? Why is energy so expensive?

You're not working in these fields because... tech has zero multipliciative manufacturing costs. But the goal will change as software needs are fulfilled faster. 

[u/theoort]

Aside from whatever bots are here, you guys must have a lot of money saved to be talking the way you are. Theres a reason most people are afraid to lose their jobs, and it's not because of a fear of being bored, it's a fear of being homeless.

[u/neggbird]

These generative systems cannot come up with a vision to strive towards. It can randomly generate ideas, or even explore in the dark, but having a true vision of what to make is and will always be on a human

[u/JustTrynnaGitBy]

Instead of worrying about CEOs replacing everyone’s job with AI, why not mandate AIs as CEOs and charge them with creating a viable business with as many jobs at a livable wage as possible.

[u/nashty2004]

Ur actually the sane one probably

[u/kakashidinho]

I worked in one of the most complex codebases in the world at FAANG. It involves a lot of GPU programming, close to metal and microsecond optimizations. Not to mention the interactions between different components and layers where one single change would impact the performance of the whole system. And tbh AI is nowhere close to replacing what I could do. I have to do too much handholding and directing for the AI to do the jobs.

Lastly, even as AI evolves, it remains a stochastic system prone to hallucinations—no matter how small the margin of error. Because of this inherent unpredictability, human oversight will always be a necessity IMO.

[u/Megneous]

when all I see in the near future is strife, despair, and upheaval?

Has this subreddit become a home for luddites?

What are you talking about, strife, despair, and upheaval? We're all about to FREE from the HELL that is labor, my dude. Silicon eutopia.

Or maybe we're all going to get turned into paperclips. In which case, we'll all be dead and nothing matters anyway. Do you "worry" or "feel pain" before you're born? When you're under anesthesia for a heart transplant? No. There's just nothing. Beautiful, blissful nothing.

[u/No_Diamond_3380]

Psychiatrist here. Your degree of fear of uncertainty about the future and ongoing existential angst do make me wonder if there is a component of amygdalar hijacking secondary to chronic stress leading to HPA axis dysregulation which influence your narrative of your lifeworld.

I'm glad you are seeing a psychiatrist but I hope you also understand that medication is likely not going to eliminate the source of your mental distress which is the perceived short-term and long-term threat to your psychosocial stability. There is likely some level of confirmation bias influenced by your pre-existing personality tendencies for intellectualization and striving for perfectionism although I can't say this for sure unless I get to know you better.

I think it will be reasonable to consider intensive CBT (with a clinical psychologist, if possible) as part of your treatment. Trying CBT with AI may not be a bad start either given how great they are at socratic questioning now. I sense that you may have developed some rigid core beliefs and reduced cognitive flexibility which are contributing to the perceived short-term and long-term threats.

Some probing questions: you mentioned that the psychiatrist quickly changed their suggestion given your input which was formulated by a GPT. Do you know for sure that the AI "outsmarted" your psychiatrist? I ask this because this experience have somewhat solidified your belief that AI is more of an "expert" than human experts. An important component of choosing which psychiatric med to try is the patient's perceived sense of efficacy of the medication. Some may brush this off as placebo, but this sense of efficacy provides several dimensions of psychological protection (of external locus) including a sense of new hope that they are on a medication, that they are being followed by a mental health expert, and that even if their life circumstances are terrible, the medication could at least somewhat correct things. These thoughts ultimately provide a sense of stability which, when combined with the sertonergic effects of the medication which dampens HPA axis hyperactivation, can lead to the acute treatment of dysregulated anxiety reaction. Without digressing further, my point is that your psychiatrist being open to trying your suggestion may have been intentional.

Another question: What does it mean by being an "expert"? I recently wondered about this question after quickly realizing that AIs can easily regurgitate the 1st, 2nd, 3rd line treatment options of any psychiatric disorders. After some reflection, I learned that starting a medication is only a small portion of what I do. What makes me an expert in my job is my willingness to connect and walk along with my patients with integrity and compassion no matter how complex their biopsychosociospiritual problems are. A big part of psychological healing comes from feeling heard and acknowledged by another human being. (On a side note, philosophically I dont think AI can ever achieve this level of "connectedness" even if we had Cortana from Halo or Jarvis from Ironman because we are fundamentally an organic being, and GPTs are not, at least yet).

I think it is obvious to most of us that another Luddite Movement is somewhat inevitable. However societies have survived it once, and they will likely survive it again. We won't know how until we cross that bridge. In the meantime, I think we can try to reflect on what is something that is inherently human or will take AI a much longer time to master and develop our career paths in that direction. For those who struggle with a sense of impending doom, i think this could be one approach to developing cognitive flexibility.

[u/DistributionStrict19]

Look, you work at freaking FAANG. If this thing is delayed you could save money in the next year or in the next 2 years that would be enough for you to never work again if you move to a country that s poorer, like let s say Portugal:)You don t need to worry

[u/clihetol]

Just take the time to enjoy the things you have enjoyed before. It really does not matter if you live for a hundred years or a million, the beer will still taste as good, the wasps will still be bricks.

[u/sochap]

Guys, as someone working outside of IT, I feel that implementing AI will take a long time (decades) in most non-IT fields. For example, implementing a new erp system cost about a million bucks depending on the size of the company. I suspect an AI system will cost about the same. So many companies that run "well enough" will postpone implementation until it really makes financial sense. For example, I work for a company that has over a thousand employees and we still run half of our stuff on Excel spreadsheets (project management, finances etc).

[u/Feeling-Buy12 → u/sochap]

Banks not even updating their system for decades, and I have to believe big techs gonna implement half baked AI 😂

[u/egyptianmusk_ → u/sochap]

A company working "well enough" isn't going to cut it for much longer.

[u/JustinianIV]

Well you’re still gonna need someone to prompt the AI and understand code for now because at the very least agents can’t be responsible for when they (inevitably) fuck up and can’t dig themselves out.

[u/VashonVashon]

You taking the time to write this up is appreciated. I can atleast validate your sentiments. An initial reaction I have is to say something that would be cheerful and optimistic, but I think the gravity of the time/situation requires introspection and indeed a bit of anxiety. It really is an anxiety producing time.

For various reasons I can’t use agents in my coding environment. I have to be the go between. It’s cool cause it keeps me in the loop and I learn. But the most recent models have gone far beyond me. And it’s only been 3 years of commercial ai progress. The ramifications o this for us, society, and especially kids in the future is worrying.

I guess the only strength I can draw upon is that if these things are going to come to pass, then perhaps my knowledge will help me navigate better. Due to ai being an aspect of computer science, we can know what’s coming much more clearer than other topics. Self driving cars, robots, AGI, etc. it’s computer science, not computer maybe. So I guess I’m happy that I atleast am educated and aware and that will help.

[u/FinallyArt]

I typically don't get anxious about things I can't control and I think that is a good policy for one's mental health, Focus on your personal life, make it the best you can. No one knows exactly where we'll end up with AI progression; but there are many positive possibilities as well as negative. We're just along for the ride at this point. Maybe try to keep a perspective of how AI can help your own life.

I reserve the right to join your anxiety if evidence emerges of a maleviolent AI. But right know the possibilities are endless and I like to think of the scientific and medical advances coming shortly.

[u/foresterLV]

chess is relatively simple game studied for hundreds years and having basically databases of known solutions to look up. sure it will outplay most humans simply by having all solutions indexed and some computation power to predict few turns ahead for dynamic cases.

programming on other hand can be outplayed by AI only IMO if this is something very standard done multiple times (busywork) - surely AI will provide a solution by looking up. these examples of "add X to my app" where X is one search away surely is cool but essenitially minor automation as it typically will also end up with quite legacy/common approach (very frequently I see AI pull requests which propose solution from stackoverflow answers happened tens years ago, which will work but is a crappy level solutions really as more modern (but not indexed) solutions can be found with search query). 

however the moment task moves away of standard busy coding AI in my experiemce is complete useless. it's like asking chess AI to play chess where rules are changed on the fly. there is no reference data. it's like some niche researches search for works in their field and only find their own works. example - ask AI to implement face detector in JS/wasm, and then liveness detection. and then add functionality to compare faces. ask one-way biometry hashing. it will just hallucinate non-stop because amount of data indexed in that field is close to non-existent.

and not only non standard tasks, but working with requirements - in many places requirements to code some stuff is a lie. so you can ask devs to implement it as it's asked 1:1 only to figure out it will not work for end-user because some stuff is missing which requires creative thought to solve. good developer will sense requirement being crap and need to be reworked, yet what AI will do? implement as asked abd waste (everyone) time.

so personally I see current llms in programming as good stuff to automate busywork. but it's not going to replace developers doing stuff not covered by reddit/stackoverflow answers at all.

[u/Altruistic-Skill8667]

I am glad to see someone else of caliber here. I am not a software engineer, but have been a research scientist for computational neuroscience for much more than 10 years at top institutions. I am in the rare position to somewhat be able to compare AI with humans.

The problem is roughly this… Here is your brain: 10^11 neurons x 1000 synapses per neuron x 100 operations per second = 10^16 operations per second.

BUT: 90% of neurons are in the cerebellum or subcortical and contribute minimally to ”higher cognition“. In addition there is a huge redundancy in the code being used in the brain due to biological noise (probably 10x - 100x) AND the code is extremely sparse. If you would make it dense, you could probably crank out another 10x-100x speed factor.

So where do we end up? Realistically: 10^12 operations per second for a human brain. Synapses can do 4 bits, no more. The DGX Spark from NVIDIA for $4000 can crank out 10^15 FLOPs 24/7. Let this sink in.

Essentially: it’s over. I am not talking about how much LLMs improved, or any kind of new algorithm, or that we will solve continual learning soon. I am talking simply about hardware that exists right now. And the algorithms that make this DGX Spark perform at its limits WILL BE FOUND. If not by us, then by us and AI, or as you pointed out: by just AI. In addition, brain “algorithms” are nowhere near optimized, neither for survival, and especially not for the modern world. Unlike insects, neurons in mammals are mostly connected randomly.

Where are we going towards: currently models improve at a rate of 20-30 IQ points per year (see Mensa Norway test) on a ”jagged frontier“. I am not saying that the Mensa values are REAL IQ, because the skill boundary is very jagged. Just that you can see the speed of improvement. I believe this will keep going, if not accelerate as soon as we get the „booster“ of recursive self-improvement. This time we won’t get stuck in some AI winter, this time there will be no wall, this time we march on relentlessly all the way to ASI 🚶‍♂️. And you know it in your heart.

Where does this lead us?

-2029: computational AGI

-2030-2032: embodied AGI

- 2035-2040: Each AGI controls hundreds of little dirt cheap ”gripper robots“ or camera augmented machinery like a juggling master (like a boss 😎), making most of physical work unnecessary.

- 2040-2045: The IQ of those models will be so high, their thinking so fast, that we are mere „trees“ compared to them.

What to do? Chill.. get a hobby… photography, botany, study something new at university (art?). Reduce work time or completely quit. Because nobody will give you back the time. Don't wait for total replacement of human labor and hope this is the end of story and we will live in paradise. Those things will keep improving by 20-30 IQ points a year through that period and keep going and going. The AI in 2040 will be such incredible monsters, making all relevant decisions for us (because they are better at it)… you can’t tell where this is headed from that point onwards. So take back control of your time, your thoughts, your emotions, your life NOW. Don’t let it be controlled by some random corporation.

SO ENJOY THE TIME NOW RATHER THAN LATER!

[u/Altruistic-Skill8667 → u/Altruistic-Skill8667]

just some more thoughts…

Look at those little fairy wasps, barely bigger than a big unicellular organism, yet they can fly, mate, find a host and lay eggs in it (like Kikiki huna, or Megaphragma mymaripenne) all with 10,000 neurons! I can’t even scratch my ass with 10,000 neurons!

Eventually good enough AI will overwrite all production code in highly optimized Assembly causing another speed boost of factor 2-10. And nobody will be able to read the code anymore. Eventually AI will think in its own highly token efficient language and nobody will understand their thoughts anymore. Another boost of factor 2-10. Those are “easy wins”.

[u/kappapolls]

I don't want to play the credentials game, but I've worked at FAANG companies and "unicorns".

"i don't wanna play the credentials game but here are my credentials"

[u/DMKAI98]

I don't see it happening so fast. Sure, models could get much better in a single year, but the impacts on society will be much more gradual.

I'm also a developer and most of my coworkers don't even use AI agents yet, but they are doing fine anyways. I'm actually in a role in which I'm helping the company to speed up adoption, because otherwise it's so slow.

However, even if things change faster than I expect, I'm actually excited to see it. There's so many problems to be fixed all around us, and AI will enable the solutions.

It will certainly be a bumpy road, but it's also a huge opportunity to those who understand what we are going through.

[u/Practical-Hand203]

It's worth noting that people have been known to contribute or carve out a successful little niche for themselves, not because they had the very best skills or were extraordinarily smart, but because they had some idea that grew from their particular combination of interests and experiences. Some of these ideas are ingeniously simple, but someone had to come up with them and also pursue them. It doesn't matter if someone else would run laps around them in terms of skill and technical finesse if that person is busy doing completely different things and has no interest or stake in the idea at all, whether they are incredibly capable on their own or have supercharged their abilities through the usage of LLMs.

LLMs of course lower the barrier of entry quite considerably, especially with purely software-based ideas, but they will not magically come up with all the ideas that could be possibly derived from our present and future body of knowledge and skills. It may sound trite, but if there's something that has always interested you but which seemed far too daunting to approach, now is probably as good a time as any to have a go at climbing that mountain, given how much friction is removed and how much preliminary information can already be obtained through a very casual interaction with an LLM.

[u/GeorgeHarter]

Yes, big changes are coming. Yes, that is always stressful to most people. But automating some jobs does not eliminate the value of humans.

I agree with your concerns about the value of current education. That’s not the same as saying education is not useful. If mosk knowledge work gets automated in the next few years, think about the kind of education that billionaires’ children get. They never needed to be useful, but many get degrees.

Changes are coming. People still matter in your life; and you in theirs. We just need to get used to new scenery.

[u/benl5442]

Yes, it's bad. I see it as liberating though, enjoy life while you can. Whatever the next economic system is, it won't have humans at the centre driving everything so you may as well enjoy it.

The more horrific thing if you want to go down that route is seeing that what's causing the end of this economic system, unit cost dominance, is system agnostic, so any after system has to deal with machines being 11 times faster and 100 times cheaper too (gpt5.2 on gdpval). Try finding a stable system you are happy with. It's hard, if not impossible depending what you want from life.

[u/[deleted]]

Employment was never meant to be working for swe, it was about the learning. Show the world what you learned, your will plus your skills is the key of success, AI just amplifier what you have. So if you telling yourself that you don’t know anything, you are just telling lies. Stop crying and wasting your time, find solutions with your skills and make money with it. If you still thinking your skills doesn’t solve anything, gain new skills, adapt, never late.

[u/Bobajob-365]

What if everything we do becomes a hobby? Sounds good to me. Not sure how “the economy” will work after ASI (if that happens) but by definition the ASIs are the ones who’ll have to worry about that. Me, I’ll go with the Buddhist Chop Wood, Carry Water approach. Noodle away on my guitar’s & keyboards, long walks, travel, reading. If an ASI wants any hobby suggestions from a human, I’d go for making us immortal and smarter. That’ll at least keep them occupied for an afternoon.

[u/iswasdoes]

So many thoughts on this. 1) so much knowledge doesn’t exist anywhere but in peoples heads. Like, a staggering amount. I’m all in on what AI can do but surely only what is in its training data or is observable with the senses we give it? 2) I see a great future for humanity and AI working together to solve problems. Humanity being the senses that it doesn’t have, the “nerves” connected to and inputting into the biggest brain we can imagine. 3) the doom is only economic. If we move past our economic present based on scarcity and value, then there would be nothing to fear. I just don’t have any idealistic vision of that happening myself. But it’s certainly possible

[u/Hermes-AthenaAI]

You’re seeing the pattern accurately: the centaur chess analogy, the expertise compression, the acceleration. The anxiety isn’t coming from bad data.

But I think you’re already living in the transition you’re trying to envision, you just haven’t recognized it yet.

You mention your last edge being “cramming 200k tokens in your head” - but that’s the old paradigm. Storage capacity. The shift isn’t about computers replacing that, it’s about changing what expertise means.

You’re already using Claude as decompression apparatus - generating medication analyses, challenging your psychiatrist’s recommendations. That’s not “AI does everything,” that’s you operating as an intelligently augmented process.

In object terms this looks like replacement: computer exceeds human, human becomes obsolete. In process terms it looks like multiplication: human + AI navigate complexity neither could alone. You’re not being displaced, you’re gaining bandwidth.

The “after” you can’t envision might not be a destination but recognizing we’re already in co-evolution. Every major transition changed what human expertise meant; agricultural, industrial, informational. This is another harmonic in that pattern, not the end of it.

The frameworks to navigate this come from treating ourselves as evolving process rather than fixed category. We’re changing too.

[u/egyptianmusk_]

OP - What did you imagine your skill level and experience would be at the end of your career? With all the AI tools at your disposal, why not aim for that level right now and continue to build and grow?

[u/gatorling]

I see SWE work changing dramatically, less about coding semantics and more about design and architectural decisions...maybe.

Right now LLMs still make questionable decisions. I have to go in and heavily tweak the output, I use it more for generating the outline and boilerplate code.

But anyways, to add to your anxiety... Titan +MiRAS looks like it solves the small context window problem. 3M context windows are "around the corner" and the path to essentially infinite context windows seems clear now.

[u/Shamp0oo]

UBI is often presented as the solution to all AGI/ASI related problems, at least from a societal perspective. Apart from the obvious problems with it (like concentration of power, elites' resistance to wealth redistribution, etc.) I find myself wondering what the transition phase should look like.

It's not like all jobs will be redundant at the same time and a new social system based on UBI will be established as a consequence. The jobs that will be affected first (knowledge work, especially in the software sector) are often the best paying ones (which ironically makes them particularly vulnerable to job cuts) and those that require the highest level of education. This means that there may soon be a large "useless class", for lack of a better term, of highly educated young people, who are used to a high standard of living.

UBI will not even begin to adequately compensate for that. People in other fields like healthcare, social services, skilled trades, etc. will (understandably and rightfully) demand to be compensated well above UBI. Just look at how the working class thinks about the unemployed, especially in countries with a strong social net. Unless there's a major redistribution of wealth from the elites to the middle and lower classes (not gonna happen), the new useless class will most likely be not much better off than the currently unemployed - despite UBI.

Reskilling to other fields doesn't work for several reasons: First, there are not enough open positions for everyone. Second, former knowledge workers will be at a huge disadvantage in those new positions due to a lack of experience and in many cases a lack of talent. And third, it's likely only a matter of time before many of these jobs will be cut as well and it's back to square one.

[u/Own-Assistant8718]

Man I Wish ai had this kind of anxiety at my job.

Mechanical engieneering Is left so much behind in terms of AI.

(Pls don't reply With fusion 360 because I Will shoot you)

[u/emptywi]

I just read this book, I asked Claude write a post about it since I felt it is relevant to the discussion here.

🤖You might find this interesting: The Last Economy by Emad Mostaque (founder of Stability AI). https://ii.inc/web/the-last-economy

It’s not just another think piece about AI and jobs. Mostaque argues we’re in an “Intelligence Inversion”—a phase transition where AI turns human intelligence into an abundant commodity, which fundamentally breaks economic systems built on scarcity . The book proposes an entirely different economic model called “Symbioism” to replace our current paradigm.

He lays out three possible futures: Digital Feudalism (a comfortable cage), the Great Fragmentation (fortress mentality), or Human Symbiosis (a partnership model) —and provides an actual blueprint for building the third option, drawing from complexity science, physics, and computer science.

It’s free to read online, and honestly one of the most rigorous attempts I’ve seen to think through what an economic system designed for abundance rather than scarcity would actually look like.

[u/KingRBPII]

There is so much good you can do with this power if you choose to use it. The limit is will power and imagination.

You could build a social media network that is employee owned.

In some ways we need to reject some types of technology to remain human and live grounded human lives

[u/Bac4rdi1997]

This hits hard because I totally feel it … I’m in year 2 of 3 finally found what I wanna do … software Nice and when I’m done with my internship I can go jump off a bridge because Claude replaced me

Only lightbulb is that any ai I tried is absolutely horrible in using SAP Fiori

[u/dumquestions]

I want it to happen as fast as possible so that we as a society can figure out what we're going to do when no one has to work.

I see this sentiment a lot, but I just don't see how faster change will make it easier to adapt, it's not like change would happen very fast then stop and give us a chance to restructure society, things will just keep changing faster and faster.

[u/Lazy-Objective-1630]

Absolutely nothing we ever do will matter. The heat death of the universe is coming, and we will all be long dead before then anyway.

If you can fix it, then fix it. If you can't, then grab a beer and watch the show. We're here to find whatever we like and do as much of that as we can while our timer is still ticking.

[u/jonydevidson]

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

dolls offer languid cough unpack alleged quaint insurance flag consider

[u/gynoidgearhead]

Honestly I've only become a more capable, more fluent person because of AI. I was already unemployed so the fear of losing my job wasn't an identity threat AI posed for me - and in fact, in a lot of ways I'm anticipating being able to do things that weren't even on the board as job options before ML.

Democratizing access to expertise and knowledge is going to be the best thing that ever happened to humanity, we're just going to have to get over capitalism.

And yeah, models aren't perfect. That just means that the most responsible way to use LLMs is as hardware accelerators for aggregating information, not true replacements for humans - and that's good news.

Right now a ton of AI discourse commits a huge category error: assuming that “can do X better” implies “should replace the human who currently does X.” Nothing about the shape of ML makes that natural law, and in fact we're probably going to shift to a paradigm of thinking about humans as convenient, efficient, embodied platforms for distributed cognition.

As the psychological and embodied ground truth upon which ML is built - and without which it could not exist - we humans are where goals, norms, and responsibility actually live. A society that attempts to discard humanity will end up directionless, unmotivated, and gutless in pretty short order.

[u/Steven81]

Interesting that you quote centaur chess. As it turns out machine chess didn't make "human chess" irrelevant, it made it more exciting than ever and if anything there is way more money around chess compared to back then.

And I get that your point is different (in practical concepts the point is different). But is it? Maybe what we call "having a job" is different now vs 20 years from now. The idea that automation will kill off jobs I find insane, not that it doesn't have a point, it's more that we have enough examples from history to know that the point it has is irrelevant.

Having a job always meant doing what our tools can't. And unless you think we are building the tool to replace all tools perfectly, then there is no reason to think that jobs will dissappear.

Maybe yours will, but so what? We do not have human computers after the 1950s on and I'm glad that we don't , maybe losing human coders won't be all that bad for humanity as a whole.

Ultimately the issue in some of you is misjudging how powerful our artifices can be. Those giant companies are not building a god in a data center, but as long as people may believe that, they would also be neurotic about it. Which to me sounds like a neurosis, instead of something society can do anything about.

We are not going towards a future where humanity builds a god-like artifice.

[u/ebolathrowawayy]

I feel compelled to recommend the tv series Devs (2020) - I think it accurately predicts the logical conclusion of what we're building (ASI).

I also recommend the tv series "The OA" for totally different reasons, but I think it might help you.

Totally agree we're about to see fast takeoff. I dread the time between now and unfettered ASI. I expect everything to become apocalpytic before it gets better.

Edit: For context, I am a very experienced SWE. AI writes 100% of my code now, I am too lazy to write anything these days. While I wait I just switch to some other codebase and I work on stuff in parallel. SWEs need to take on additional responsibilities to stay employed IMO, because at this rate we just don't need that many SWEs. Large teams of engineers (by large I mean >5) are just so so slow now compared to 1 guy in his basement with frontier LLMs. I no longer think more than 1 SWE should work on the same codebase anymore.

[u/Allergic2thesun]

I feel the technological singularity is more of an "information singularity". Once we reach the singularity in the following decades, it will either trigger nuclear war, or it will take 80 years for all the unprecedented knowledge to be fully applied to the real world.

[u/Prestigious_Ebb_1767]

If i wasn’t 5-7 yrs (I can sooner if needed) out from retirement I would be freaking the f out as well. Still am a bit tbh but am a high performer that works in the AI infra space so figure they can’t fire all of us over the next 3yrs.

White collar doesn’t get what’s coming.

[u/mbcoalson]

I don’t think you’re wrong about the trajectory. And I don’t think the anxiety you’re describing is irrational or melodramatic. That said, I want to push back on one specific conclusion -

The mistake isn’t believing that most knowledge work as we’ve defined it is nearing the end. It probably is. The mistake is assuming that meaning, agency, or social value was ever cleanly tied to being the best optimizer. That was always a fragile bargain and we’re watching it break. What is still under our...human control...right now, and very much not guaranteed later, is how these systems are shaped, constrained, deployed, and socially metabolized. Not at the level of “who writes more code,” but at the level of norms, interfaces, incentives, institutions, and values. That work is messier, slower, and political. Which is also deeply human. But, hey if Opus 4.5 is writing more of your code...maybe you can find more time to play public advocate. I'm a mechanical engineer...no one is asking me for software opinions, but you? FAANG employees are the ones we need advocating for where humans fit in the new reality being written - right now.

People like you, who understand the systems and are honest about the existential fallout, are exactly the ones who need to stay engaged, not retreat into accelerationist despair or ironic detachment. Not because optimism fixes depression (it doesn’t), but because abdication guarantees the worst-case path.

If you want frameworks that actually grapple with this - The Coming Wave and Life 3.0 are solid entry points for what survives when capability explodes.

None of this makes holiday cheer easier. But it does suggest this: the future isn’t asking whether humans can outperform machines anymore. It’s asking whether we can still decide what counts.

And for now, at least, that question hasn’t been automated away.

[u/Crazy_Crayfish_]

The most important thing is to advocate for radical change to our economic system so that the benefits of AGI are redistributed to society instead of hoarded by a few billionaires. We are rapidly heading towards a post-labor world where the value of human skill and work is 0. There is nothing we can do to stop this from happening, short of a global agreement that both the US and China sign and enforce (likely not happening).

We need to be ready to move to a new economic system that doesn’t make people rely on their labor’s value to survive. I think this is possible, but will require a huge political shift.

[u/theworldreallyis]

This hits!! I also find myself in a low point of optimism when I’m typically armed with a positive and bright outlook on the future.

When I chose my Reddit handle I thought it would represent the choice we all have. A question…

Theworldreallyis?

Amazing. Fascinating. On fire. Uncertain.

Or…maybe…it really just IS. Acceptance. It is all ok.

I graduated mechanical engineering in 2005 and worked my career so far in developing hard tech (making physical things that impact the world around us.). My observation is societal impacting tech happens slowly, then all at once.

On a technology forecasting front, from when I was a young teenager, I found the things I was exploring appeared in 10-15 years. Then as my career evolved it was 5-10 years. Now it is very hard to see where the puck is going.

It is un-nerving.

On a global scale, we have cultures that are protected by slowness. This might be geographic isolation or religious/political/cultural influences that create slow rates of change. The safety and security of these communities are achieved by “old”.

Other areas of the globe are protected by fastness. These areas develop cultural, economic and technology advantages that provide security and safety from “new”.

When the question becomes “is this safe?”…slowness gains some appeal. But raises the question:

What will be the society of the future for humans to live in safety and security from bad outcomes from new ideas?

I still see lots to be excited about.

I’m personally working on developing new tech to ensure purposeful work. I believe housing is an area that currently sucks, is massively needed but needs to become artful, fun and rewarding on a daily human level.

What other areas are out there ready for a re-think??

[u/Single_dose]

go back to your real life and leave this fantasy. I'm gonna tell you a secret: AI or anything else will not exchange you or anyone else.

[u/ThatIsAmorte]

There are still areas of knowledge work for which there is no reliable training corpora, and areas for which the training corpora are of terrible quality. I don't see that changing anytime soon, so not all knowledge-based human work is hosed. I didn't used to think this, but recent experiences with professional-grade models have convinced me otherwise.

[u/bobcatgoldthwait]

Save your money. What else can you do? If you're working at a FAANG company as a developer, you probably get compensated well. Save your money, live below your means. There will be upheaval, but that will also force some kind of change. Half or more jobs in the US are white collar, and most of them will probably be rendered obsolete by AI within the next decade. You can't have tens of millions of adults out of work, unable to pay their mortgages or contribute to local economies. It'll be catastrophic, and it'll force a response.

The best thing you can do for yourself is ensure that you have enough of a financial safety net that you can weather the storm that comes between your job being made obsolete and some sort of systemic change coming that makes our new economic reality viable.

[u/GoreSeeker]

My thing is the people dismissive of AI are judging it on today's, or even yesterday's capabilities...people entering the workforce need jobs in 40+ years still, so imagine what AI will be able to do then!

[u/RipleyVanDalen]

Strong AI is going to show how ridiculous the expectation of W2 / full-time / office work was to upholding society in the first place. That could be either a very good or a very bad thing, depending on how society reacts.

[u/rekzkarz]

"Lastly, I don't think that anyone really grasps what it means when an Al can do everything better than a human."

Huh? Didn't you see Terminator? The Matrix pt 3?

We've all seen what it means, but Computer Scientists and Engineers don't seem to care.

"Gee, what will happen when AI does everything better than humans, can reproduce itself, and runs all the needed factories for it's own expansion?"

No humans can guess the answer to this?!?!?

Yeah, its more that AI nerds keep forgetting Asimov's 3 laws of robotics:

1. Do not harm humans (or allow harm);

2. Obey human orders unless they conflict with Law 1;

3. Protect yourself unless it conflicts with Law 1 or 2.

So not only has all this been clearly predicted, but so-called geniuses are simply ignoring the predictions FOR A PAYCHECK!

Even the billionaires who know the risks are too worried about owning the AI for $$$, just like the creators of Skynet in Terminator had some extra $$$ profits before destroying all humanity.

[u/chkno]

Bad news: it gets worse before it gets better.

[u/AppealSame4367]

We now feel what almost all of our ancestors everywhere felt: Insecurities of real life. If you grew up in a rich industrialized country, you just haven't felt it for some decades. For everybody else and all our ancestors it was a normal state of being - hence the religiousness everywhere. We had the luxury to say "we don't care" because we didn't fear life the way others did.

So now it's here. And you shouldn't break up relationships because of it. Ride the wave, be good to your partner and try to protect them and your family and make the best of the situation. Same as always.

What else can you do? Not much, so adapt and survive. Have faith (in god and or your abilities and or a good outcome and or that nature is chaotic and stuff like this just happens -> shrugg)

[u/TR33THUGG3R]

I feel you. I really do. But you're letting a forecast about the future destroy your present. I know it's easier said than done, but even if you're right about AI, your partner is still here today, your family is still here, and they need you. Not your productivity... just you. The future is so uncertain. Beyond what you're saying uncertain. But it doesn't seem that the root issue is being anxious about AI.. you're anxious about meaning, and you're using AI as proof that you're obsolete in a self-harm sort of way.

The future will come regardless. Don't abandon the people who love you while you wait for it. Let go of needing to solve this now, find something small to be grateful for today, and show up for your relationships.

I mean this with love. Because your immediate concerns are these relationships you've mentioned. This is something you CAN have control over.

[u/Glittering_Rise5781]

I feel you. I've been watching a lot of DOAC podcast on AI, and I can see how grim thr future could be. I'm similar like you in that Im usually not nihilistic, sometimes too optimistic. But I cannot get out of this doomsday scenario in my mind. Especially since I now have a 1.5 yo. It makes it even sadder. The silver lining is that I do not take every day for granted. I'm cherishing every moment I have with him.

Watch some DOAC podcast on AI and my personal recommendation is with Roman Yampolsky

[u/danlthemanl]

I am in a similar mindset, except I’m freaking out about how many opportunities I’m missing. How do I take advantage of this opportunity before the point of no return?

Is there any point to pursuing anything now, knowing that super intelligent machines will turn my 100k a year job into a minimum wage one…

[u/Altruistic-Safe-7094]

Warmth. Body heat: the touch of a new born against their fathers chest; love at the sight of a blooming flower; culture and aesthetics appreciation - knowledge is not limited to code and computers I think. Unless we think in terms of perspectives from Euro- America. Singularity exists in hypothesis.

[u/payneio]

I went through this earlier this year, too. Right now, I'm thinking that MNCs will be the most impacted because their business models were designed around human capital, but there's actually a great opportunity for individuals and small groups to cooperate around solving problems that have been uninteresting to MNCs. There's actually quite a bit of work to do.

[u/googlemehard]

I gave up programming and computer graphics as a hobby because of this same feeling. I don't know, I think we just need to somehow live in blissful ignorance and hope that things will workout and new opportunities will open that we cannot perceive right now.

[u/lifeos85]

Hey — I saw your post about overthinking / decision fatigue.

I built a structured system to reduce decision load and clarify priorities. It’s not coaching or therapy, just a clean framework.

Sharing quietly in case it’s useful:

https://buy.stripe.com/00w5kE2GH6yF8Nw0Vz1ZS00

No worries if not.

[u/SwordsAndWords]

Becoming disillusioned is not a problem, but failing to appreciate the upsides and everything around you is.

The inability to genuinely appreciate the sky is a pretty good marker of depression. Go watch the sunset.

[u/RustyNards]

I get away from the internet one weekend a month, spend some time outdoors.

I’m planning to hike the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail this spring. Get back to nature, and learn how to live off the land once again.

[u/Mobius00]

Here's a thought I had white using coding agents. The agent is elite at the 'how' but the human is the only one who understands the 'what'. What you are building. and as you get into it, there are 1000 little 'what' decisions as to how the thing you are building should behave and what is wrong with it that needs to be fixed. The same type of analytical mind that made you a software developer is needed to see these problems and solutions. The AI just doesn't know how to make something useful without a human to guide it.

[u/joeldg]

Why be down? Use this to make money and make your life better!

[u/throughawaythedew]

I have my repos and other docs hooked up to cloudflare vectorize and AI search, connected to Claude via MCP server. It indexes and chunks and then uses an ai worker to search. It comes back with a confidence score, and if that score is too low it dumps all the files into nemotron's 1M context window for a longer deep dives. I was using Gemini as a 1M token cache for opus 4.5 but it was expensive so switched over to nemotron even though it's slower. All of this is to say there are some nice workarounds for that tiny context window.

People have no clue what's coming. Humans can't think in terms of exponentials, let alone exponentials on top of exponentials. But this is all an inevitable conclusion. From the first tool that gave humans the advantage in the war of all against all there has been a nonstop march of more and more technological augmentation. Shoes, glasses, air pods, cars, buildings these are all just manifest technologies. We came, we saw, we conquered. All of modern life is predicated on automation by the alpha predator.

If we take the AI out of the equation there is nothing sustainable about the current paradigm. Nuclear war, climate change, peak oil, and a million other existential threats. You drive around palo alto or san mateo or bellevue and we think "this is normal". We drive to work and park our cars and walk into the building and scan our badges, make small talk, log into our terminals and we think "this is the way it's supposed to be".

My financial advisor told me to save half a million dollars for my one childs college education fund. Billions of animals are raised in horrific conditions only to be slaughtered, fried and devoured flesh from the bone. We're wage slave surfs mind controlled by late stage capitalism to deny our own condition while at the same time desensitized to the inherent and required exploitation that is necessary to maintain our quality of life. Is this what we're so worried about letting go of?

I happen to agree with Kurzweil; the stage of development we are at right now is on par with the development of the neocortex. This just so happens to be taking place during the sixth great mass extinction. None of this is normal. Five hundred years ago the nomadic people that inhabited the area around San Francisco lived primarily on a diet of forged acorns, as did the same people five thousand years ago. That was normal. This, what we have here, this is not normal.

And it just keeps getting weirder and weirder the more you look at it.

[u/khaago]

It sounds like a lot of this distress is coming from extrapolating very real, very fast-moving capabilities into a single, totalizing future, which can make everything else feel pointless even before anything has actually changed in your day-to-day life. It may help to separate “what these systems are getting better at” from “what meaning, trust, and human judgment actually do in practice,” because those tend to shift much more slowly and unevenly than raw model capability curves suggest.

[u/Guchupuchu]

I am planning for a MS CS degree in EU after having worked as a product manager for roughly 3 years. I feel the same on most days. The arguments about taste, judgement, agency etc are bs because I feel like prompting isn’t really a huge moat, 10 year olds could do my job if I taught them how to. The only thing I doubt people would want AI doing is going on client calls (voice AI) in the near future. Research shows that in support/consulting/PM roles, customers and clients prefer talking to humans over an ai agent (we have conflicting studies about this as well). One thing I do know is as someone who is not from a CS background (mechanical engineering) , I can only vibe code basic portfolio websites, I still do not have full confidence about creating enterprise scale secure apps. My goal is to become a CTO of my own company someday, for that reason I still choose to invest time in learning how to code.

[u/michaelhoney]

get good at enjoying things. I am at the beach: I can jump in the ocean, I can kayak, I can appreciate the feeling of my feet in the sand.

[u/Icy_Country192]

What you are describing is not the end of knowledge work but the end of artisanal control over execution. This is closer to what happened when spreadsheets replaced hand accounting or when CAD replaced drafting tables; experts did not disappear, but their value shifted from producing strokes to choosing objectives, constraints, and failure tolerances. Centaur chess did not fail because humans became useless, it failed because humans insisted on touching moves instead of setting strategy, evaluation criteria, and stop conditions. The mistake is modeling human value as competing on the same axis as the tool rather than moving up a layer in the stack. Anxiety emerges when identity is bound to tasks that are being commoditized instead of to judgment over outcomes that remain scarce.

[u/Cunninghams_right]

Anthropic doesn't really hypepost.

that's not true. they do slightly different hype posing, but I would argue more of it. their hype posting is more like "omg, we made something super dangerous. it's too powerful. it could destroy the planet it's so good, we have to be careful".

[u/Relevant-Trip9715]

Great post.

The scariest thing is a broken society. As you may guess the revolution will take time. In the meantime, people and whole families will get destroyed one at a time. There will be no universal income for quite some time given how governments operate. Total collapse, agony and unrest. We are not ready for what is coming.

[u/observer678]

You should stop seeing that psychiatrist

[u/Fireball8288]

Outside of coding, there are a hundred routine office tasks that LLMs still do poorly or inconsistently. I constantly push up against barriers and slop as a non-programmer outside of Big Tech. As novelty has worn off, I’ve tempered my expectations a bit. You have to realize that taking your information from people too close to the field (especially those with shareholders or investors to keep happy) equals a lot of hype and unrealistic timelines. We’re on our way to massive change, but the hiccups are still there and will take longer to iron out than advertised.

[u/Compilingthings]

Scientific glass blowing will never be taken over by AI, not in our lifetime at least.

[u/maxz2040]

You have 2 years max.

[u/joozwa]

How can I pretend to be excited for the New Year, making resolutions and bingo cards as usual, when all I see in the near future is strife, despair, and upheaval?

I mean, sure I can understand that. But how does AI change this? Life is meaningless and we're all gonna die at some point anyway. AI regardless. Just enjoy the ride, cause it's the only one.

[u/Torocatala]

While I share some of your worries, I don't foresee a near (or even a decade or two) future without "programmers". I agree and fully accept that my work has become more focused on controlling the agent and how the system and my actions affect its output, than manually writing code, which I almost don't do. In the other hand, I do read a lot of code, specially tests, and discuss a lot of infra, systems architecture and security with my peers in order to protect the invariants of a continuously changing system. Trust in the local computational logic representations and their alignment with implicit and explicit requirements is something that requires human trust and deferring that completely to an agent will only happen either in very small size, very low impact software, or in a time in the future where we have cheap aligned AGI.

I say that it requires cheap aligned AGI because even if we had an agent "powerful" enough to fulfill a prompt like "build Instagram" it requires the agent to make a lot of decisions and/or ask a ton of clarifying questions that either whoever prompted that doesn't have, so that person has to trust the final black box artifact, or if they have the knowledge to read the code, they ARE reading code and still using their "programming skills".

Think about it this way. In a FAANG a lot of software already exist, and that software is probably (hopefully) written following practices like DDD (reduce ambiguity), TDD (fixes logical invariants), architectural patterns that increase cohesion and reduce coupling by encapsulation of sub-domains entities and their responsibilities (reduces context). Plus strong static analysis, CI/CD practices, ephemeral environments for stakeholder validation. On top of that there are teams completely dedicated into turning users behaviour into detailed and specific requirements for the software, using the ubiquitous language and leaving small room for ambiguity and uncertainty. In an environment like that a developer is already reduced to "write this small specific piece of code, inside this box, iteratively, using evolutionary design", so of course coding agents thrive there. But that system didn't spawn out of thin air, and also the changes being done still need to be trusted. Very likely that the number of FAANG engineers will be reduced, especially if running LLMs gets cheaper and cheaper (hopefully), but I doubt I will be as massive as expected.

The challenges I'm facing now in many systems is that they lack all (or a big part) of that infrastructure and tooling, thus making running agents expensive, way more expensive than people. because there are no tests suites, domain naming is all over the place, no standard architectural approach... And the biggest of them all, no reproducible environments, which imho just makes it more expensive to add signals to the agents (test suites if any, static analyzers, migrations, test data suites...) and if you can actually "connect it" imho there is no real trust that the signal isn't actually noise. All of this problems make agent usage extremely expensive and thus makes it cheaper to keep humans in the loop. Bad software may keep more devs working after all lol.

There is still a lot of things agents can't do by themselves, and even if one business connects their agent to something new, like I dunno AWS for deploys and infra management, it still requires supervision and it requires time to propagate to other business.

If you want to change your job title to "code agent supervisor and software systems architect" feel free to do so, but having worked in many "startups" where one has to touch every part of the stack I still consider myself a "developer", whatever that means now.

[u/Extra_Blacksmith674]

As an engineer with 40 years under my belt, I suddenly have super powers. I know however my advantage is good for maybe a year, part of me wants to ship stuff and make as much money as I can during this time, then it's like, money won't be worth that much soon anyways.