Another AI Post v.1

We had a meeting today, where I was told that we were really planning to pivot hard into machine generated code for our SaaS product. This meeting has been weighing on me all day, and I think I finally managed to put into words part of why that might be. Seen here is a message I sent to my supervisor, attempting to express what about this has gotten under my skin.

I think I've figured out one of the reasons that this plan for AI puts me in such a bad mood. And it partly is because, try as you might to pretend that it's not, it is coming to take my job.

I not only like writing code, but I'm actively proud of the code I write. Nothing fills me with quite as much pride as having my code go out into production and get used by people and make an actual difference in the product. And when, as an intern, I was given the chance to do that for the "print to PDF" feature, I remember being so excited and proud that something I had written was actually being released to the public. Even if I hadn't come up with the idea, it still felt very much like something I had created from out of nothing. That shouldn't be a surprise, because I've often talked about how one of the things I love the most about software development is that: I can wave my hands, write my magic words, and create something that never existed before.

But how can I be proud of code that a machine writes for me? Beyond the other (what I feel are completely rational) fears about deploying code that we don't understand and can't maintain, beyond the fears that the machine doesn't even understand the code that it can't maintain, beyond all that and down to a basic human "desire to create" instinct... Where is the pride in just babysitting and prompting and reviewing generated code? When it gets deployed, how can I feel like I've made anything, or created something special and unique? How can I see myself, or my talent, or my own particular brand of "art" in code that I've had next to no actual contribution to outside of maintaining a markdown file that tells the machine how to pretend to be me?

If I'm not proud of what I'm doing... Then why do it at all in the first place? Just for money to pay off a mortgage that I only applied for because I thought I was going to continue to be happy working to earn that money? I mean, obviously I'll have to. My comment in the morning meeting about having bought a house wasn't that I was afraid I wouldn't still have a job to afford it, it was lamenting that I would wake up one day no longer wanting to do the work, no longer being happy to be here. It's sort of the same reason I never wanted to go up the "people management" track, but at least then I could've still been proud of the people I managed/mentored. However, there is no conceivable way that I will ever be proud of something produced by a machine running a model owned and operated and fully trained by some soulless, faceless, "big-data" corporation like OpenAI or Anthropic, no matter how many markdown files and system prompts I create. Because there's no triumph, no soul, and no art to be found in there.

Would I quit over it? No... probably not. But would I sink into the trope of "I work at a soul draining job that I hate just to keep a roof over my head"? Yes... but I don't want that for myself, and I would wake up every morning hating and dreading that something I used to love so much had decayed into this rotten and unfulfilling role. Like a relationship turned sour, I would remember that "it used to be so much better" back when I loved what I did. So, would I quit? No, I'd just let my performance drop back down to the "bare minimum required by the contract of my employment" - No more late nights working a problem. No more going out of my way to go above and beyond to make the impossible happen. Take a passion I truly love and destroy it? Then I guess I'll just "work here" from 9 to 5 and start counting down the days until retirement.

And that's sort of my stance on this whole thing, and it has been bothering me all day.