Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?

I feel this way, so I shut my startup down. Not sure what I'm going to do next but I'm hoping it isn't so computer dependent. The reason I got into computers was unregulated opportunity and freedom and it's just the opposite today.

Find something that has meaning to you.

Corollary to your complaints: Another downside that I haven't seen on anyone's AI hatelist yet is that it crowds out all other discussion. What happened to everyone talking about languages, protocols, algorithms, architecture, etc.? We can't have those conversations anymore because we're not even sure they matter now. In fact, we probably suspect they don't, hence the not bothering.

Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.

I think one aspect of this relates to extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation.

I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist, and I enjoy exploring the problem space and working my way to a good solution. AI is great because it accelerates my abilities in this regard.

If I'd had only extrinsic motivations of credit and money, I can see that AI would affect them negatively. But I'd also have to believe that anyone else could AI-shortcut their way to whatever I make. I don't really believe that TBH. A real solution is extremely nuanced: it addresses many, many edge cases; it is performant in CPU and memory use; its UX steers the user away from incidental complications straight to the solution they're seeking. Being able to attend to all that doesn't seem everyone's cup of tea.

Finally, even if someone just copied whatever I had made, I would still have the satisfaction of knowing I was the original and they the copycat. That's good enough for me.

> enable cheats in a game

Great analogy. Life does not have cheats though. Things are changing fast but the limits of physics still apply and reality has a surprising amount of detail[1].

I find myself feeling the way you are feeling when I stop making things. When I'm making things it is very clear where the limits and frontiers have moved to, and that's where the fun is. I would say just start exploring and making things and you'll soon see that "you can do anything" is not true. There is still enormously fun work to be done and puzzles to be solved, with the help of AI or without it.

[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

I agree that AI is a gamechanger in many ways, however it is not the end of life or the end of civilization. Life will go on, and people will be happy productive members of society, even with AI becoming part of everyday life - at least that is what I believe, since believing the alternative would be self defeating.

When I think back to the 90s when the internet became popular, to me, living in the middle of nowhere, being able to interact with others through a computer, it was such an exciting time and it is what got me into programming. I believe right now today, there will be young people who may, just like me, be super excited about this AI thing, want to learn more about it, become a wielder of it, with all the energy and hope that comes with youth, just like when I discovered the internet. To them AI is not a "learn this new thing or you are going to be left behind", but it is probably something that gives them hope.

Even older people can do this. I remember when I was 16 a taxi driver, probably in his 50s asking me to tell him about this internet thing: "what should I do to learn the internet?". I fondly remember this driver since he seemed to have such an innoncent interest and willingness to learn from this 16 year old who didn't know anything himself.

Even with AI, as good as it is now, as well as with it becoming better, people will be part of the process. Although I'm nostalgic about how software used to be created, I'm trying to embrace the new way of doing things and look for new opportunities and a way how I can make a difference, with a positive outlook - this has never failed for me in the past.

1. why haven't we developed blood in the lab yet?

2. why haven't we developed organs in the lab yet?

3. why haven't we invented space travel yet?

4. why haven't we solved food, shelter, cover for all human beings on planet earth yet?

5. why don't we have absolute democracy and have hold politicians accountable for their inaction, exploit and abuse? (specifically using Software and AI). Where are the dashboards of all public info of each politicians with organization chart of each country representing top leader with nodes of people working under him/her and further down.

I think the phenomena we are experiencing is "change". That's what change looks like. Out with the old, in with the new. It feels like nothing matters only because this is all happening too fast.

Since we are talking about AI, I'll bring up one thing that hasn't changed, or hasn't been solved at least by AI. Understanding. We are producing so much more than ever, yet we are not understanding the world better.

You can experiment it yourself, just because you have the world's knowledge at your fingertips doesn't make you an expert in every field. I asked an LLM to teach me everything I need to know about batteries so I can get into the business. All the information is there, a well crafted curriculum. The amount I didn't know that I didn't know before starting is depressing.

Extend this to the idea that now everyone knows everything about everything and you'll quickly realize that we still don't understand much about anything despite this powerful tool on our hand.

Understanding things still matters.

> Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.

Holy F. elephant in the room !

We have to adapt. This what happened to textile workers during Industrial Revolution. Satisfaction of crafting things disappeared once machines automated the work. I literally hesitated to code manually again because I've figured out how to drive this “creature” properly. It can do almost anything faster than me. (for production context).

Upgrade toward sales and management ?. At least cover our basic daily needs, so we still have freedom to explore different interesting domains.

I feel sorry for brilliant engineers who rely too heavily on their technical skills, because those skills can become almost "irrelevant" in day-to-day work.

Some of them literally refuse to adopt AI in their problem-solving process. They still can't accept that “my hard-earned knowledge from decades of learning can be wiped out in just one day.”

I still think there's some junction between software and the physical world that's the next exciting frontier. There's a whole new world opening up that we've never been able to tackle before. Imagine a world where we can shift all these bright folks from working on ads and SaaS to working on new materials discovery, fundamental sciences, healthcare access, climate change, etc. Working to make the world around us a better place.

We can now build apps with a TAM of 1 or 2 viable at scale - I still have hope there's a lot of good we can do for the world with that new reality. Purpose-built tools for super niche, high-impact problems, where software isn't the end goal, it's just a means to an end.

What do you think? Still meaningless?

Hey, congrats on coming up on a birthday that ends in 0. Mine was just 5-0. I can give you two pieces of possible advice:

- nothing does matter. You will die. We may meet in the Bardo if you are spectacularly unlucky.

- the trick is now being kind and enjoying your time after discovering this.

I don't feel this way at all - and I'm in my late 40s. I'm excited about the future of technology, not only because of AI but also other opportunities next-gen GPUs and new power-efficient processors bring. RISC V. Cheap PCB manufacturing. Cheaper FPGAs and, perhaps, even homebrew ASICs. Much to be excited about.

And look around you - so much pain and suffering in the world. Lots and lots of problems to be solved, hopefully helped by all this technology.

Sorry, it was always meaningless. The shiny toys just distracted our attention enough to trick us into thinking there's a golden pot at the end of the rainbow. But now we can reach the end of the rainbow and it's emptiness.

Read Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Everything under the sun is vain, as we will all eventually find out.

Nothing will satisfy us because our emptiness was never meant to be filled with code, knowledge, or whatever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlvOrTq4Bes

This is a form of ego death and should be taken seriously.

Your/our place(s) in society have been shaken up like dice in a cup...and someone may not even care to pour them out and see what numbers come out.

What are you like when no one is watching?

Like any death, it will re-arrange your values.

Fortunately existentialist philosophers have been grasping with this for some time.

The secret is you have to make your own meaning. It can be scary. Don't freak out. You've essentially been forced to become a radical non-conformist.

Also: the ego usually reassembles itself like the robot in Saturn 3. It just comes back a little different, a little more mature. And often it's grateful for every good thing you've ever done for yourself and others.

The joy being gone is the big painful one for me. Talking to colleagues and friends who like slopifying everything, they seem to love it. It's a divide between us and them; they never really liked programming in the first place and only considered it a job.

Anyone can do it? Is everyone you know making a million dollars a year with their software startup? Are you?

IDK, this seems short sighted. In my experience AI doesn't just create great things out of the gate. It CAN assist, but the AI flyers, writing, web interfaces etc, they have gotten played out really quickly. AI flyers just get ignored, writing is detectable after about 3 lines and AI interfaces get less usage. I definitely feel like there have been similar waves that equally faded out.

Yes, but it's more because I haven't had substantial work in a long time and less about AI/ML specifically. Despite limitless info at our fingertips, tech interviewers have doubled-down on asking one to recite memorized facts point blank, which I was never great at as a generalist and now seems completely obsolete.

I’m actually incredibly excited for the future!

Individuals are now a lot more empowered to work effectively with computers (including us in the tech industry). Would you honestly wanna go back to pre-LLM?

I now have more fun learning CS concepts and the side projects I can work on now were previously impossible.

On the other hand, if you only got into CS for the money… then I take your point.

The thing you describe was perfectly addressed, as far as I can tell, in a piece of short fiction about AI that was written in 2021.

https://m.fictionpress.com/s/3353977/1/The-End-of-Creative-S...

Might be tolerable if it would have given us fully automated utopia, but instead we get to watch the world burn and know nobody’s gonna do anything about it.

I can relate to the cheats analogy. But there are still plenty of other games left to play.

Sounds like you're burnt out. Maybe its time to touch some grass and think about what is really important and meaningful to you.

About 150 years ago, Nietzsche wrote

> God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

about the secularization of society. Perhaps something similar is happening to knowledge work now, but I think it was never a great idea to derive all your life's meaning from it anyway.

Thank you for asking this. I am in my 40s and have been working with computers and programming since my teens. I am considered as a good developer in my circle but have slowly started to lose my motivation.

Doing what matters has become essential; discerning what that is, less clear.

Family, community, religion are pretty timeless and universal.

Yeah, the worst part is feeling suspicious of new things because who knows if anyone actually put any thought into it or if it's just slop.

Also while a lot of this generative ai stuff is technically interesting, I do wonder what the opportunity cost is. What else could we have gotten if big tech and investors decided to spend 1.5 trillon dollars on other things? Instead of a machine that outputs the most likely token given an input.

Also the amount of spam that is going to being and going to be created because of these tools is very frustrating. It feels like the open internet is going to be coming to a close just so communities can manage the spam tsunami. And I don't just mean signup to view websites I also mean private internets created with tools like Netbird or Tailscale so your content doesn't get scrapped anymore.

Yes, but also no.

On one hand, the possibility to make something genuinely new feels gone. There was always a huge crowd of better developers than myself, but still, they couldn't take all the ideas for themselves. Now they can.

On the other hand, I love the process of programming, and the feeling of accomplishment it brings to me. I don't know if I'm still going to have it at work, and this is genuinely important, but at least nobody is going to take my personal projects from me.

Tonight I was up until 3.30 am, writing a CLI to wrangle a shapefile into a set of vector tiles that would then be rendered into PNGs. Opus could probably have done this in five minutes. I'm writing this (mostly) myself, it's been two evenings of work, and I'm not done. If Opus could know how utterly I don't care about this fact, it would have cried. I'm not gonna stop eating cheese just because a robot can eat it better.

(But I'm not trying to debate you here, you feel what you feel, and if I don't agree then it's none of my business anyway. Hope you find strength!)

there's still ego & competition against other humans which is what I do to distract myself

No one will care because it's just another addition to the mountain of slop, and the guy bagging your groceries can do it.

Did the universe bestow on you some right to code better than the guy who bags your groceries? This whole post oozes a sense of wounded, bitter entitlement.

I was fired a while ago and hit my "why am I waking up today?" point.

Took me a while but turns out the best reason I found to exist was taking cool pictures of bugs. Fuck me are spiders cool. Dragonflies are incredible. Look at that springtail!

Do something ai can't take from you.

I set myself a goal to find all 3 species of a particular spider genus in my state. Got it! Moving on to finding a bolas spider.

idk. There really is a lot to enjoy outside the collapse of the things I used to enjoy and define my existence by.

Nothing has been taken from you. If writing software brings you joy then write software. Or do you mean a path to riches and elite exclusivity you have in your head has been taken from you? The hard fact is you’re just not that important. It’s a bitter pill and we all have to deal with it at some point.

Yes. And math too. I think there's lots of beauty remaining in understanding these things, and using that understanding to craft things cleanly rather than as slop, but no one will pay us to do it, so we will never have the opportunity to do it.

Not particularly because: the LLMs can code, but holy hell can they not operate or plan appropriately for ACTUALLY high stakes operational situations. When you absolutely cannot cause downtime, if you hand Fable/Sol/Kimi the reigns and say "do this 30 million token novel thing and absolutely don't screw up customer traffic" they'll blow it after the first compaction, every time.

This is on things like "we have to migrate how we do TLS termination via coordinated infra changes and DNS changes for a couple thousand customers, many of which are fortune 500 companies". It's maddening. If there's stakes, and it's not a small enough problem that there's not already a StackOverflow post/library for how to do XYZ, then you have to be so vigilant.

make software for yourself, learn maths for enjoyment. times have changed. i guess there will always be software jobs but they wont be the same as in the past. if youre thinking of a way to make money and earn prestige at the same time in the computer industry i dont know what the answer to that is.

Indeed it feels so uninspiring, no talent/skill needed and my experience of 17 years feels a bit pointless. In the past few months I have used Codex to build apps, so it's not like Im not using AI it just makes my/the career seem dumb.

Also, the LinkedIn recruiter semi flood of messages offering potential jobs has dried up completely(anyone else experience this too?). Linkedin is now just a sad and depressing place as you read others sharing similar sentiment.

I'm now in medical school pursing mid-level medical type job. This after 17 years of doing UX Research, Web/graphic design and front-end development. 10 of those years I was working in govt indirectly making very good money and little stress. Now my future in the next few months is hospital work with lots of stress and less pay. A bit depressing but i dont dwell on it too much just keep pushing ahead!

Then why not just do the things you want to/can instead of the things you have to?

I am unemployed and surviving since last 4 years and being creative every day. In between I am also doing what I really want to do.

I have raised my bar really high to weed out the shitty employers and companies after 16 years in the industry and focus on what I want to do. I believe the money will just follow. It always has for me.

I genuinely think AI feels overblown and AI seems more like a feature.

https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-openrouter-can-be-the-next-...

Maybe how medieval monks felt about the printing press. Even the guy bagging groceries can create books now!

See better.

If AI was actually as good as the VCs and execs want you to believe, there would be tons of new and exciting things being created every day and new opportunities for everyone. There isn’t though, the one cool new technology is the coding agents themselves. But there’s no amazing software, no awesome new games or movies, no breakthrough medicine, no new foods or biotech, no fun electronics or gadgets. Coca Cola couldn’t even make a decent 1 minute commercial with gen AI and millions of dollars, it was just a random sequence of trains driving through snow. Where is the promised techno utopia? It’s all just slop. The malaise is from these VCs force feeding us all slop and telling us this is the future. I’m not saying current AI isn’t impressive or useful, I’m just saying it hasn’t really made anything better yet. I don’t think it’ll be that way forever though. I’m still long term bullish on AI, I just don’t think transformers are enough. We need something that enhances creativity and innovation, that improves quality, not just make it faster and cheaper to put together mediocre products.

I think things will turn around by the end of next year, but not before some major reckoning. There is a lot of motivated reasoning going on right now with trillions of dollars at stake where people aren’t being discerning and honest about what AI is actually capable of, and a lot of circular cash flow that’s making it seem more successful than it really is. I think when it really arrives, we’ll see a creative explosion that enriches our lives, where everything isn’t just cheaper to make at 80% of its former quality but actually better quality too. And I believe the solutions for improving quality will surface the things that human beings can uniquely do that AI can’t and give meaning back to our lives, but right now we’re in a shitty in between phase.

Find a hobby that'll scratch that creative itch. I recently got into woodworking and its been a blast! The Anarchist's Tool Chest might be right up your alley [1]. Christopher just released the revised edition a few days ago. There's a link in the description to a free pdf download.

On a similar note... the whole idea behind making your own furniture is similar to hand rolling code. You can go ahead and buy a dresser or bed at ikea and call it a day, but the quality is complete shit. Or you could build something that will last a life time and be praised for it's quality.

[1]: https://lostartpress.com/products/the-anarchists-tool-chest

Euclid: "There is no royal road to geometry."

Ptolemy I: "I have this 'Royal Road' AI right here."

E: "Can it tell you the precise product of pi*e?"

P: "Piece of cake."

It’s not unusual to feel this way right now. The world is arguably in an interesting state.

One thing to keep in mind is the world probably felt this way a few times as well. During the Vietnam War and the administration at the time probably made people feel powerless to do anything. 1930s crash. Lots of other examples like this.

AI certainly seems like a unique tipping point that reaches into all aspects of humanity. So, maybe it’s different this time.

Totally. I've learned a lot this year, but the knowledge feels shallow. I'm now mostly outcome-oriented, rather than focused on the journey.

I've tried AI and it takes either an expert to steer and evaluate or enormous patience and some level of expertise to make it work at all.

Its a false sense of efficacy. Like looking at a dating app and thinking you could date any or all those people: the reality is no you can't and you don't even know it.

So cheer up: life is still hard as f*ck.

Ideas and execution is basically dead, because any idiot with a keyboard and a spare hour and some api credits can build almost anything you can now.

I myself have built so much shit lately but it all feels incredibly shallow.

I used to get joy from software, now it feels like fast fashion. Even systems engineering and low level code. Fast fashion. Derivative shit, flung at the void.

> Learning new CS concepts

A key reason is that so many CS concepts are already well packaged in very nice libraries or frameworks. And unfortunately many people do not have to use very advanced CS concepts. Look at the so-called top 10 algorithms or data structures for , how many of them are invented recently, and how many of them do not have an amazing library of production quality? Note this does not mean that the CS field is not advancing. It's just that we have yet to find another hyper-growth area that demands novel algorithm, except probably the AI infra - except that only very few people get to work on that area.

I thought I was the only one, so burnt out from software engineering I am glad to be out of a job. I am starting to have physical revulsion at the thought of it, and I have been dealing with the fact that I have even lost my fun time in front of the PC, playing games or browsing. These days I literally feel better doing the dishes than opening Steam or watching YouTube.

If it’s only me, I can say it’s burnout and depression, if it’s an entire class of people, then the world is sick.

As for AI, I have mellowed in my extreme doomer position, though I still believe people have unrealistically high expectations and the reality of it is gonna hit tech very hard in the face soon.

Perhaps AI has instilled into me an appreciation for the human creativity, and humanity as a whole, and there’s not much of it to be found online. The Internet was an exciting place where we came to develop our nerdy selves, and today we find out it is a smelly, dirty, shanty town with open air sewer. It’s time to unplug.

I'm basically unable to work on boring things without LLMs now because it just doesn't feel like a good use of my time. I am also unable to work on thinks that are mostly vibecoded, by hand, because I know the code is bad, and I know the work will often be surpassed by a model in 1/5 the time once I get tokens again. This is not a "AI is replacing me" comment, but more a "The 90% of my job that takes time and that nobody wants to do is now automated, and not using LLMs is no longer motivationally an option". Vibecoded projects have short term rewards but long term I just find I don't really care, its not "my project" and I'm not proud of it.

I am at my happiest when I am out of tokens and working on projects that I care about myself, and am forced to tradcode. I think going forward I will have a few "Tradcode only" projects that personally interest me, to work on when I need a fix-me-up.

OP: Anyone with severe depression feels like — get off the net and book a doctor's appointment.

Sometimes. Have you ever played a single player game where there are achievements, goals, strategies to be had (...). You can often get addicted (eg Factorio) trying to optimize, make the best of your limited resources.

But then you realise you're spending too much time on it. And you just want to see the ending. So you enter the cheat codes to make it easy. You blast through everything, you get to the last levels and still easy. And things start feeling meaningless and pointless, and in fact, probably because of that, you quickly lose interest in the game completely.

It now feels like we're in the end game.

For hundreds of thousands of years we struggled with finding food, be it foraging or hunting, both of which requiring a lot of skill, dealing with several difficult diseases throughout adulthood, droughts, finding new places to stay for the night, for food.

And now... all we do is sit 8h per day in front of a screen, and everything else is taken care of. We can even have sex without having babies and a huge lifelong commitement. A first! The pleasures that it unlocks. We have food from all over the world at our fingertips. A feast no hunter-gatherer tribe would ever in their wildest dreams could even conceive of. We have cameras streaming animals from all over the world, lions killing impalas recorded being uploaded for the pleasure of people who watch it on youtube, or simply fledgling birds and their progress, we monitor the weather on all of Earth. We convert sunlight into thunder energy, and make thinking machines from rock. Truly, feels like the last levels of a game where we have the cheat codes.

A fish will rarely ask himself "what is water?". It just is. That's just how it is. So we also tend not to realise the ridiculousness of the world we live in because we have been born in it. Even more so younger generations. Some of us have seen the world rapidly changing at an increasingly faster pace. This all we have today is NOT normal. We live in the equivalent of a fraction of the blink of an eye to human existence.

Of course, we stress. A lot. Our mental health has never been worse. But this is feels like the end game. Our 'progressivism' and 'Libertarianism' led us to change a lot without thinking of the consequences. And here we are, reaching the finish line, unprepared. Our systems, laws, mental stability have no have time to adapt.

And it's scary. I hope we can pull it through.

On the contrary, only when we're an immortal, intergalactic species that has mastered the deepest, darkest secrets of the universe, there might be nothing left for us to do and you could make this complaint. Until then the number of challenges we have to overcome is basically infinite, and we finally have the powers needed to make any kind of meaningful progress on it.

There is the pesky little matter of jobs and paying rent and capitalism which will cause a lot of turmoil for a very long time, but once we get past that we have our work cut out for us.

"You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."

I have spoken to many professionals and looked at some companies usage. I can definitely tell we are in a bubble.

I noticed when a non-tech person tries to solve a problem with AI, they only tend to think in-terms on LLM. For e.g. even for a calculator app they use LLM for compute instead of direct calculation.

Sure they have managed to solve it. But they are remotely usable.

I have seen multiple failed projects taking these vibe coded ideas to production.

I wouldn't be disheartened and give up.