In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is.
You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.
Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like
a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
The entire zeitgeist of software technology revolves around the assumption that making things efficient, easy, and quick is inherently good. Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles" have sometime grandiose notions of their works' importance; we're making X work better for the good of Y to enable Z. Abstract shit like that.
No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops.
The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".
Also, I think for a good number of people, their first job out of college is oftentimes one they will look fondly back on because they've just finished ~17 years of school, have financial independence with a salary, and are still bright-eyed about all the possibilities.
> That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.
I used to race on a friend’s sailboat. One of the things that people noticed on a sailboat is that you need to and have to be focused on immediate problems, rather than any problems on land. If you fail to pay attention to problems at sea, you may no longer have any problems on land, or anywhere.
This can allow you, at least temporarily, to forget any problems you might have on land.
^^ This comment sums up the entire philosophy of happiness very well, although you first have to go through life to get the context to understand it.
I'm over 40 and single and childless. I work in Tech, have a good salary, a house, a car, investments and a second property. I have everything people work for in life but I'd give it all up for a family. I wish I hadn't been so proud and arrogant and full of myself when I was younger and made different decisions. I'd much more prefer to not have the material wealth that I have today, but instead have a home to come to after work and kids to wake me up in the morning.
I used to shrug it off in the sense that there is still time and as years went by I suddenly woke up one day to be 40y old and realised the time left me behind. I have more money than I need but have nothing that needs me. And it's nice to be needed.
I did achieve a lot in terms of professional career but now I can't help but feel that I was scammed. Nobody cares about the things that I had built or features I helped develop and ship, I doubt anyone can even see them. All those decades of my life completely invisible to the world. All I'm left with now is money and countless mental health conditions I have to deal with as a consequence of my life choices.
And I don't believe for one second that there are people who are 40-50 without any dependencies and feel happy in life. That's just bull shit. The reason why people say that is because they keep their minds preoccupied and when you don't have time to think you have no problems. The problem with that is that eventually kicking the can down the road doesn't work anymore and you reach a point when you have to stop and take a break. And that's when all your baggage comes rushing forward into your consciousness and you crash.
I often remember Blaise Pascal's quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
Even if it's the oldest lesson, it's one we all need to learn, sometimes multiple times. Yesterday was the best time to have learned it. 2nd best is always today.
> Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
Presumably you imply that moral righteousness, too, is best attained intuitively, by being useful to others and helping them (to do whatever, like a useful idiot?) without conscious thought for what's right.
Or else you're saying "help people for no reason even though it isn't right, and you'll end up feeling good that way so it's fine".
These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do day-to-day. It's bittersweet, for sure - it feels inevitable that the craft of software development that I've loved for years will be seen as an archaic relic at some point in the not too distant future. It may be several years yet before the impact is broadly felt (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years) but this train doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. This post was a helpful reminder that who I am is not defined by the code I write (or don't write) - there's so much more to life than code.
I could have written the same comment. Maybe it was me just sitting down one weekend and really giving them a chance but something changed early this year. The coding agents just got really good or, like I said, maybe it was me just taking a hard look at them. For better or for worse, the software dev industry is never going back to they way it was.
One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.
> (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years)
We definitely saw some kind of non-linear step function jump in quality around the beginning of the year - it's hard to express how good Claude opus/sonnet 4.6 is now. However, I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of improvement from here? It's kind of like we got to the 80% point but the next 20% is going to be a lot harder/take longer than that first 80% (pareto principle). Also, as more and more code out there is AI generated it's going to be like the snake eating it's own tail. Training models on AI generated code doesn't seem like it will lead to improvements.
At the very least these ai threads where we argue this ai topic will be of great historical interest as our profession either dies or mutates to something else!
I think you're missing the point. My entire career has been looking up and reusing code written by humans who are objectively better at writing code than AI ever will be (please don't argue about this).
Your job has always been to be accountable for the technical decisions made. Sometimes I read comments like yours and wonder if the almost apologetic tone is an admission of guilt that you never really liked this job. You can speak for yourself, but I didn't get into this to just noodle around or work at unhinged startups where nobody gives a rat's ass about code quality.
My new goals are: Seek beauty, Seek happiness and Don't make people sad.
With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.
I love this! Stealing it! :)
It reminds me of T.H.I.N.K. before you speak.
Ask yourself if what you are about to say is true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, and kind!
As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was and then found so much more gratification as a SWE, all I can say is, the author's experience is not universal. (And I am a parent, so it's not about disliking kids.) I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.
> I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.
I recall being pretty miserable working in a maze of cubicles surrounded by coworkers. I don't think there are single solutions for any of these questions. What works well for one person will not work well for another.
So interesting. I also found work in tech, as a DS, more gratifying than teaching. But part of that was finding remote work freeing. Office work is Kafkaesque. I can easily work 40 hours a week or produce more than the equivalent amount of progress on assigned tickets, but I just can't fake being a good officemate for 8 hours a day straight. Plus progress seems so slow in the office. So many distractions and interruptions. With no opportunity to decompress.
I work mostly remotely, recently our Fibre internet upgrade left us without internet for a week. It forced me to work from a nearby university library - which turned out to do wonders for my mental health.
I found a little thriving town in the university with all the important things I needed and the most important thing of all: human social interaction and seeing people around me.
Thanks for saying that! I was worried I was the only one. I mean, I'm glad I tried it, but I was happy to get back to a little more determinism in my day to day.
Super interesting to hear your experience, I agree that it is very dystopian. I have put up with it (with effect on my performance and somewhat my mental health), to be around my family more. Things like doing pick up and drop offs at school consistently has been wonderful.
This is exactly why, as someone who thought I'd be an IC with my head buried in code my whole life, I accepted a role as a tech lead last year. Humans will always need other humans to be human for them. I love working with computers, but supporting, teaching, and mentoring junior engineers has been rewarding for me in ways that writing code never could be. There is no social substitute for concrete relationships with specific people that grow in visible ways. Maybe they can automate away the part of me that's good with logic and reason, but empathy can't be simulated.
The latest developments in digital culture are somehow more frustrating than anything I saw in the previous 26 years. Experience is replaced by prompts. Taste perfected over the years with defaults.
I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.
Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline.
Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year.
Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.
Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.
Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.
Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c.
But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
Funny, I also accidentally formatted my dad’s hard drive, destroying work, while trying to install Red Hat, though in my case it was 6.2 “Zoot” somewhere around 1999.
And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.
>I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".
Learning the lower layer felt like earning access to the next level of reality. You had to understand the constraints to make anything happen at all. Now it increasingly feels like you can just describe the intent and skip straight to the outcome.
I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!
The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.
The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added."
AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.
Carpentry has always been an implementation detail for making furniture. They have been able to purchase flat-pack chairs for all of their lives, but for some reason there are people who learn this skill and have fun slowly making things that factories already make at scale. A subset of those people have made lucrative businesses out of the very human craft that is carpentry, and are able to create custom pieces on-demand that you could never justify retooling a factory to create.
It is okay to view code as a means to an end. I disagree, preferring to treat code as craft, and striving for better systems that are easy to understand, maintain and extend. And I think that's the source of our disconnect; deeper than one's opinion about AI is one's value of human skill and the effect that has on the output. Maybe I overvalue it, and maybe creating code "manually" is going to look more like carpentry in the future; but you cannot expect to convince a skilled carpenter that an IKEA chair is just as good and accomplishes the same task.
If you see programming purely as a means to an end, then yeah, I get this perspective. But to many there is enjoyment in the _doing_ and the craft of it beyond the end result. It’s why people get into woodworking or knitting despite the fact that it’s much cheaper, faster, and easier to buy a table or a sweater than to make one yourself. Value is subjective, and for some the value of code is not primarily in what you can sell to others.
I think all it means when we say 'solve problems in real life' is just the stuff you have to do that tooling can't abstract you away from any more.
The sharp end of the debate now is around what exactly that means in the LLM world. It's extremely unclear what exactly the new level of abstraction unlocked is, or at least how general/leaky it is.
There's obviously just the stance of enjoying the craft, and that's one thing off to the side, but I think the major source of conflict for those who are more oriented towards living in the top level of abstraction (i.e. what you can do in real life) is between some of the claims being pushed about said level of abstraction and what many still experience in actual reality using these tools.
If you've never made any effort to connect what you do to the underlying mathematics, then no wonder you think it's all an "automatible" implementation detail, despite three decades of the industry trying and failing.
I started coaching my son's little league baseball team a few years ago, mostly because that was the only way I could keep him interested it and I just wanted him to keep playing a team sport. But, that first season showed me how incredibly rewarding the whole process can be. Every practice, every game, you see them improve. And the more you work at designing a good practice, helping each player develop skills, the better they get! And, the joy...the pure, unadulterated joy of a short stop making a a clean throw to first for an out, a hit into the grass with a quick slide into second for a double, a dash across home after a wild pitch rolls into the cage for a run on the steal! I don't get paid, of course, but it's the best job I've ever had.
I don’t even know what he’s referring to. What are the rectangles he’s “moving around”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about all writers, for example?
The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.
Isn‘t it ironic that we software devs laughed for decades when we automated other people‘s work with our code - „it‘s called progress, deal with it, dinosaur!“
But now we see that a meteor might have hit our planet too.
Heh, I've posted here for years and every post I've made saying programmers should unionize has been controversial at best and nearly dead at worst. So many people trust the same system they watch eat others.
I certainly wasn't laughing, plight of a fellow man is nothing positive. But this is usually so abstracted and distant from one's work that unless you have somebody close who gets literally hit themselves is just abstract movement beyond horizon due to myriad forces and random events.
Csikszentmihalyi's flow research[0] basically predicts the author's whole arc here. People are happiest during structured, challenging activities with clear goals and tight feedback loops. Coaching middle schoolers in a gym hits every condition on his list.
Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.
[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it
> Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.
Would like to hear more about this. Both for myself and from what I've seen in others, people tend to be far happier during a relaxation-focused holiday trip than during their average working Monday.
I once heard a former professional athlete say the hardest thing about working outside the world of sport, was not being able to look up at a scoreboard at the end of the game every week and know how well you did.
Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.
Yeah, hopefully an outgrowth of this will be new amazing applications like that, that we never could've dreamed of before. I imagine "distributed services" will be "solved" by EOY, and the days of glorified CRUD app coders making 200K straight out of college are over for good.
But I think there will be new opportunities for people who are willing and able to learn. Entirely new fields will pop up and somebody will have to work on them. Most likely, the CS grads who are out of a job, or just frustrated and want to do something else.
So I don't think the opportunity to do innovative things and make a difference in the world is gone. But the opportunity to do so by typing code into a text editor may have breathed its last.
Odd. I never felt that moving rectangles around was my shot at happiness. My whole career I've spent doing things I genuinely believe are useful and help people. If moving rectangles is no longer useful then so be it, I'll do something else.
I love software engineering but I've never really been great at it, if I'm honest. I'll be sad if it goes away, but there are much more important things: nature and access to the outside away from noise and cars, for example.
What I find quite funny is I don't think we ever really got that great at software. There are bridges in my country that are 150 years old and carry 200 trains a day. Most software projects don't even last 5 years and are riddled with bugs.
It still remains to be seen whether LLMs can really do software, though. It will be interesting times ahead, for sure. Maybe we'll realise that recycling old content over and over again isn't good for us, before it's too late.
Amazing story congrats on being a great coach - this kids will remember you and that experience.
My experience on tech as a parent (3 kids under 10), I find their time on iPads etc playing games, music and audio books to be good for them (they don’t get grumpy after it, and particularly playing Roblox with their friends online is great fun - real halo 3 vibes for me), watching shows they get quite difficult after if the have watched for extended periods (smaller the screen the worse it is), but if they get access to anything with a constant scroll / stream of things they go haywire. My son found YouTube on his nanas iPad and mainlined it for half an hour and then went crazy. My daughter lost it over browsing Amazon.
We are withholding social networks & scrolling video as long as humanly possible, but difficult when you don’t want them to miss out on anything, and there’s an element of controlled exposure…
Again great story, makes me want to sign up as a coach. Sorry for the tangent!
> But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader.
I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.
“ For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better. As someone outside the equity class, you begin to wonder what your role is in this new paradigm. And whether rectangles were ever your ticket to happiness in the first place.”
I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run things all the time.
Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.
My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy.
I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.
On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.
There is another, deeper level of happiness, not mentioned in any of these comments. Around 62% of the US population has found it. That number used to be higher. In the tech world it's much smaller percentage. The powerful love you feel as a father or mother can actually be compounded, even when didn't think that was possible. It comes from first principles and historical truths. There is a book about it - it's the best selling book of all time.
And turns out the patterns and metaphor in this book can be co opted. Without belief in the supernatural, or submission to human authority structures. Though still receiving and giving the same benefits.
Love isn't owned by a king, it's already built in, inherent to all of us.
If you love helping children and also love moving small rectangles around a larger rectangle then Code Club from The Raspberry Pi Foundation is crushing it, and needs volunteers:
I've quit my career in academia three years ago and teach high school kids instead. I can totally relate, I'm just so much happier: I love those four things he listed, except the fourth for me is physics instead of basketball.
Great post. I coach my son’s club and school teams. 4 practices + games each week. A huge commitment but pays off in so many ways. Good for you for volunteering!
In a similar but slightly different vein, I found that doing things with my own child (now 3.5 years old) is far more rewarding than I ever imagined. Nothing makes me happier than seeing the joy in his eyes when he discovers something new, accomplishes something or even just gets excited when I come home from work.
I gave up on most passion work years ago, now just optimize for money/time and enjoy my life outside of that.
Every generation of builders believed their tools defined their value. Then the tools got easier, faster, automated, and the definition had to change.
But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.
AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.
I don’t think this whole thing had anything to do with AI or not. It has to do with ‘teaching kids in a gym’ or ‘sitting in front of a screen in an office’.
It’s not exactly nominative determinism, but maybe this could all be explained by every Ben Wallace being destined for basketball greatness (middle school or nba or otherwise)
It's great to do what he's doing, but I just had a qualm with pinning this on AI- based on my experience repeatedly trying to make AI work every time a new model comes out, what I've realized is it requires a huge amount of pre-existing knowledge and context/harness engineering to get useful outputs consistently over a long time. Even then it's not like AI is replacing you more like it kinda helps a bit if you put a lot of effort into covering all its mistakes. I do agree there's a huge benefit in using AI as an alternative to search, research, prototyping though.
Even after adding all that up maybe you save some time. 10%-20%? Maybe? You do save a lot of cognitive load as well and it feels good but a lot of the times you pay the price later when you don't understand the code/project as it gets more complex and you need to debug it when the AI can't anymore. The point is there's just not enough to replace and even if the research angle saves you some time or cognitive-bandwidth why not just use that time to do something else? Like more work or more life.
Shaan Puri has also talked about how he's been coaching a youth basketball team on the My First Million podcast recently. He says it's one of the best things he's ever done.
> For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better.
In response to this I would say that being in the industry comes with a lot of learned role-playing, and if you are no longer happy role-playing your job in one way, throw it entirely out and find a new path.
> only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better
Teams are already using AI to scout opponents and plan game strategy. IDK how much that will ever happen at the youth level because they generally don't keep detailed stats at that age but it will be coming to high school sports for sure, if it isn't already being used.
Just a reminder of how millennial-centric HN is. Everyone here is in their 40s and moving to the suburbs to raise their kids, and this article provides validation.
It is kind of funny that people here tend to dump on Reddit a lot (often times warranted, don’t get me wrong), when this place is an echo chamber in a similar way.
Yeah, I decided to become a "professional" musician a few months ago after quitting my last tech job. I'm not amazing, but I've got some places to play, and I'm starting to give lessons, etc.
It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.
I feel similarly. Being laid off and doing job search recently got me thinking about switching to become an electrician. I don't mind starting over and lower wage, but mortgage and family depending on me still hold me off.
> You know those bullshit leadership positions we all had in high school and college? Like how you were “VP of Operations” for some club, and all you did was order pizza?
This does a great job at teaching those who didn't grow up in the US, how early the insanity starts. Genuinely an insane concept for everyone who grow up elsewhere, like right out of a comedy show that's supposed to be a caricature.
I find it odd that so many comments here are fixating on the "AI can do my job 10x better" throwaway line.
I've been grappling with a lack of meaning in my software engineering job for over a decade now, well before the advent of AI. Working in a modern software organization means that most of your day-to-day effort isn't spent using your technical skills, but on navigating misaligned organizational structures in order to achieve even the smallest goal. The feedback loop is so drawn out that there is no feel-good dopamine rush at the end of a project, only relief that it no longer has to occupy space in your brain.
I'm driven by solving problems for others and seeing their lives improve as a result. But we're so disconnected from real users that it doesn't really make a difference if you reduce your product's crash rate from 2% to 1%; even with recognition ("You did good work", a pat on the back, a peer bonus, or maybe even a promotion), it just doesn't do it for me anymore, especially when any tangible positive outcome is completely hidden from me. I would rather have been ignorant to these problems and not suffered the stress in the first place.
Even when I try to help my fellow developers in a way where it's much easier to feel the impact, it's hard to make a case for a better engineering culture if means that everyone has to put in an epsilon of extra effort in a day and age where every team ascribes to a scarcity mindset. I actually believe I can have more impact building a medium-sized product by myself with the help of AI rather than fighting for scraps in a software organization which pushes and pulls randomly in all directions.
Over time, my tolerance for nonsense and systemic "injustice" (i.e. incentive misalignment) has effectively disappeared. Every time I rub against an unnecessary barrier that was put up by another person, intentionally or not, my motivation simply drops to zero. I constantly have to wear an emotional blanket to keep from feeling angry and frustrated, and it makes it hard to experience genuine emotional fulfillment in my life outside of work. I simply have no patience left to spend in my life outside of work, where it actually matters.
I 100% identify with this blog post. I feel more happiness taking a friend's kids to the climbing gym and listening to them tell me about their experience doing a difficult climb. I feel more happiness from mentoring a robotics team of goofy but driven teenagers. I feel more happiness when my writer friend tells me that she still uses a wooden tablet stand that I built every day. I want my life to feel like it's making a difference for other people in a way that is unique to my talents and skills.
Life is not an optimization puzzle where the goal is to maximize wealth, status, influence, or prestige. Yet it feels like that's really all that a corporate job can offer you these days.
I had a similar coaching experience. I took 2 years off and I'm excited to jump back into it this spring. It's tremendous fun and the impact is easy to discern.
I coached sports for all 3 of my kids. Great times.
One year, I had a superior athlete on my youth football team. A foot shorter than everybody else and skinny as a stick, the boy had the gift of speed. He’d run like the wind, arms and legs flailing wildly. It looked like he’d cover distance twice as fast as the other kids.
I took full advantage of the situation. Every game, I started by getting wonder boy the ball until we’d racked up enough points to be comfortable. Then the others got turns. We went the regular season undefeated and I began to convince myself I really had coaching talent. Maybe I could help out at the high school, or the local college! The sky was the limit, I was a natural.
Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster!
Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go.
I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.
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bengale|1 day ago
You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.
Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
nvarsj|1 day ago
perrygeo|23 hours ago
No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops.
The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".
et-al|1 day ago
mr_toad|7 hours ago
I used to race on a friend’s sailboat. One of the things that people noticed on a sailboat is that you need to and have to be focused on immediate problems, rather than any problems on land. If you fail to pay attention to problems at sea, you may no longer have any problems on land, or anywhere.
This can allow you, at least temporarily, to forget any problems you might have on land.
steeleyespan|21 hours ago
jraby3|1 day ago
My job was to make sure the 40 kids that came were having a good time. When your job is to make others happy, you become happy.
Fr0styMatt88|18 hours ago
joshkojoras|12 hours ago
I'm over 40 and single and childless. I work in Tech, have a good salary, a house, a car, investments and a second property. I have everything people work for in life but I'd give it all up for a family. I wish I hadn't been so proud and arrogant and full of myself when I was younger and made different decisions. I'd much more prefer to not have the material wealth that I have today, but instead have a home to come to after work and kids to wake me up in the morning.
I used to shrug it off in the sense that there is still time and as years went by I suddenly woke up one day to be 40y old and realised the time left me behind. I have more money than I need but have nothing that needs me. And it's nice to be needed.
I did achieve a lot in terms of professional career but now I can't help but feel that I was scammed. Nobody cares about the things that I had built or features I helped develop and ship, I doubt anyone can even see them. All those decades of my life completely invisible to the world. All I'm left with now is money and countless mental health conditions I have to deal with as a consequence of my life choices.
And I don't believe for one second that there are people who are 40-50 without any dependencies and feel happy in life. That's just bull shit. The reason why people say that is because they keep their minds preoccupied and when you don't have time to think you have no problems. The problem with that is that eventually kicking the can down the road doesn't work anymore and you reach a point when you have to stop and take a break. And that's when all your baggage comes rushing forward into your consciousness and you crash.
I often remember Blaise Pascal's quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
popalchemist|21 hours ago
There is never a bad time to learn this lesson.
card_zero|16 hours ago
Presumably you imply that moral righteousness, too, is best attained intuitively, by being useful to others and helping them (to do whatever, like a useful idiot?) without conscious thought for what's right.
Or else you're saying "help people for no reason even though it isn't right, and you'll end up feeling good that way so it's fine".
dgritsko|1 day ago
chasd00|4 hours ago
DonThomasitos|1 day ago
UncleOxidant|23 hours ago
We definitely saw some kind of non-linear step function jump in quality around the beginning of the year - it's hard to express how good Claude opus/sonnet 4.6 is now. However, I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of improvement from here? It's kind of like we got to the 80% point but the next 20% is going to be a lot harder/take longer than that first 80% (pareto principle). Also, as more and more code out there is AI generated it's going to be like the snake eating it's own tail. Training models on AI generated code doesn't seem like it will lead to improvements.
jimbokun|16 hours ago
throwaway1492|7 hours ago
sublinear|3 hours ago
Your job has always been to be accountable for the technical decisions made. Sometimes I read comments like yours and wonder if the almost apologetic tone is an admission of guilt that you never really liked this job. You can speak for yourself, but I didn't get into this to just noodle around or work at unhinged startups where nobody gives a rat's ass about code quality.
bloomingeek|1 day ago
With a lot of effort, it's working. However, I soon discovered the last goal was the most difficult. Long story short, I keep my mouth shut a lot more. I feared, at first, that this would make me feel I was compromising myself somehow. But I also discovered that sometimes when I shared my opinion, knowing it was correct, I would later regret how I made that person feel. Conclusion on their feelings: There's nothing to be gained by hurting their feelings when they weren't ready to hear the message. Double success, I'm still happy and I didn't cause them any sadness.
steezeburger|8 hours ago
bmikaili|8 hours ago
It's hard.
electrosphere|12 hours ago
jimbokun|16 hours ago
lr4444lr|20 hours ago
3D30497420|5 hours ago
I recall being pretty miserable working in a maze of cubicles surrounded by coworkers. I don't think there are single solutions for any of these questions. What works well for one person will not work well for another.
kj4211cash|7 hours ago
grimgrin|18 hours ago
electrosphere|12 hours ago
I found a little thriving town in the university with all the important things I needed and the most important thing of all: human social interaction and seeing people around me.
daxfohl|16 hours ago
gehsty|11 hours ago
dejawu|19 hours ago
reconnecting|1 day ago
I'm not afraid of competition with AI-driven competitors — I'm afraid of people replacing real beauty with A/B mechanics.
Perhaps this is indeed a good moment to switch to offline.
Thank you for sharing your inspiring example.
jnovek|1 day ago
pixl97|23 hours ago
This has been happening for at least a decade now, no help from LLMs needed.
arjie|1 day ago
Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.
Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.
Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.
Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
lm28469|1 day ago
But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
dkh|12 hours ago
RGamma|1 day ago
coldtea|23 hours ago
The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".
RataNova|1 day ago
pelma|1 day ago
internet2000|1 day ago
SoftTalker|1 day ago
AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.
tadfisher|23 hours ago
It is okay to view code as a means to an end. I disagree, preferring to treat code as craft, and striving for better systems that are easy to understand, maintain and extend. And I think that's the source of our disconnect; deeper than one's opinion about AI is one's value of human skill and the effect that has on the output. Maybe I overvalue it, and maybe creating code "manually" is going to look more like carpentry in the future; but you cannot expect to convince a skilled carpenter that an IKEA chair is just as good and accomplishes the same task.
skuxxlife|23 hours ago
davnicwil|23 hours ago
The sharp end of the debate now is around what exactly that means in the LLM world. It's extremely unclear what exactly the new level of abstraction unlocked is, or at least how general/leaky it is.
There's obviously just the stance of enjoying the craft, and that's one thing off to the side, but I think the major source of conflict for those who are more oriented towards living in the top level of abstraction (i.e. what you can do in real life) is between some of the claims being pushed about said level of abstraction and what many still experience in actual reality using these tools.
jimbokun|15 hours ago
voxl|1 day ago
ryan_n|18 hours ago
kurttheviking|15 hours ago
fortzi|1 day ago
Describing it as sitting in front of a rectangle, moving all rectangles around is so reductive.
gombosg|1 day ago
unknown|1 day ago
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antonvs|1 day ago
The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.
DonThomasitos|1 day ago
pixl97|22 hours ago
kakacik|1 day ago
NickNaraghi|1 day ago
Btw, the other finding worth mentioning is that people consistently predict that free time and relaxation will make them happier, then report the opposite.
[0] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience if you haven't read it
deaux|17 hours ago
Would like to hear more about this. Both for myself and from what I've seen in others, people tend to be far happier during a relaxation-focused holiday trip than during their average working Monday.
jimbokun|16 hours ago
StrangeSound|10 hours ago
TobinCavanaugh|17 hours ago
jebarker|1 day ago
daxfohl|16 hours ago
But I think there will be new opportunities for people who are willing and able to learn. Entirely new fields will pop up and somebody will have to work on them. Most likely, the CS grads who are out of a job, or just frustrated and want to do something else.
So I don't think the opportunity to do innovative things and make a difference in the world is gone. But the opportunity to do so by typing code into a text editor may have breathed its last.
globular-toast|13 minutes ago
I love software engineering but I've never really been great at it, if I'm honest. I'll be sad if it goes away, but there are much more important things: nature and access to the outside away from noise and cars, for example.
What I find quite funny is I don't think we ever really got that great at software. There are bridges in my country that are 150 years old and carry 200 trains a day. Most software projects don't even last 5 years and are riddled with bugs.
It still remains to be seen whether LLMs can really do software, though. It will be interesting times ahead, for sure. Maybe we'll realise that recycling old content over and over again isn't good for us, before it's too late.
gehsty|11 hours ago
My experience on tech as a parent (3 kids under 10), I find their time on iPads etc playing games, music and audio books to be good for them (they don’t get grumpy after it, and particularly playing Roblox with their friends online is great fun - real halo 3 vibes for me), watching shows they get quite difficult after if the have watched for extended periods (smaller the screen the worse it is), but if they get access to anything with a constant scroll / stream of things they go haywire. My son found YouTube on his nanas iPad and mainlined it for half an hour and then went crazy. My daughter lost it over browsing Amazon.
We are withholding social networks & scrolling video as long as humanly possible, but difficult when you don’t want them to miss out on anything, and there’s an element of controlled exposure…
Again great story, makes me want to sign up as a coach. Sorry for the tangent!
colinnordin|1 day ago
I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.
data-ottawa|1 day ago
It feels like since 2022 the industry has been too rushed to run this way though.
RataNova|1 day ago
matthewpick|1 day ago
toddmorey|6 hours ago
Best summation of my current feelings yet.
freetime2|1 day ago
Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.
Aeolun|21 hours ago
shermantanktop|1 day ago
I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.
On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.
quirk|2 hours ago
srean|2 hours ago
If you are talking about Euclid's Elements, it has certainly been a joy to work through them again in my retirement.
Another joy, spend money on someone in need, someone in need of help.
jjbiotech|2 hours ago
Love isn't owned by a king, it's already built in, inherent to all of us.
gorgoiler|11 hours ago
https://codeclub.org/
martopix|11 hours ago
saltcod|18 hours ago
dismalaf|1 hour ago
I gave up on most passion work years ago, now just optimize for money/time and enjoy my life outside of that.
Toorkit|6 hours ago
light_triad|21 hours ago
But programming didn’t disappear. Writing didn’t disappear. Designing didn’t disappear.
AI flips the equation: when creation becomes cheap, value shifts from how much you can produce to what changes because you showed up. The ability to have a positive impact has actually expanded.
Aeolun|21 hours ago
jimbokun|15 hours ago
RataNova|1 day ago
sardukardboard|17 hours ago
abhaynayar|9 hours ago
Even after adding all that up maybe you save some time. 10%-20%? Maybe? You do save a lot of cognitive load as well and it feels good but a lot of the times you pay the price later when you don't understand the code/project as it gets more complex and you need to debug it when the AI can't anymore. The point is there's just not enough to replace and even if the research angle saves you some time or cognitive-bandwidth why not just use that time to do something else? Like more work or more life.
sbussard|18 hours ago
this struck me
0898|22 hours ago
DGAP|18 hours ago
tap-snap-or-nap|21 hours ago
Aeolun|21 hours ago
hyperhello|1 day ago
In response to this I would say that being in the industry comes with a lot of learned role-playing, and if you are no longer happy role-playing your job in one way, throw it entirely out and find a new path.
SoftTalker|1 day ago
Teams are already using AI to scout opponents and plan game strategy. IDK how much that will ever happen at the youth level because they generally don't keep detailed stats at that age but it will be coming to high school sports for sure, if it isn't already being used.
unknown|1 day ago
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carabiner|22 hours ago
ryan_n|17 hours ago
billylo|1 day ago
gedy|1 day ago
tayo42|1 day ago
mmmm2|1 day ago
It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.
sntran|1 day ago
gobeavs|22 hours ago
hinkley|22 hours ago
What is a Hoosier?
Kiro|12 hours ago
> But I really hope to live in a world where my future kids find sitting in front of a rectangle all day to be dystopian and cringe.
What if sitting in front of a rectangle is the thing that makes you happy?
deaux|17 hours ago
This does a great job at teaching those who didn't grow up in the US, how early the insanity starts. Genuinely an insane concept for everyone who grow up elsewhere, like right out of a comedy show that's supposed to be a caricature.
stopping|20 hours ago
I've been grappling with a lack of meaning in my software engineering job for over a decade now, well before the advent of AI. Working in a modern software organization means that most of your day-to-day effort isn't spent using your technical skills, but on navigating misaligned organizational structures in order to achieve even the smallest goal. The feedback loop is so drawn out that there is no feel-good dopamine rush at the end of a project, only relief that it no longer has to occupy space in your brain.
I'm driven by solving problems for others and seeing their lives improve as a result. But we're so disconnected from real users that it doesn't really make a difference if you reduce your product's crash rate from 2% to 1%; even with recognition ("You did good work", a pat on the back, a peer bonus, or maybe even a promotion), it just doesn't do it for me anymore, especially when any tangible positive outcome is completely hidden from me. I would rather have been ignorant to these problems and not suffered the stress in the first place.
Even when I try to help my fellow developers in a way where it's much easier to feel the impact, it's hard to make a case for a better engineering culture if means that everyone has to put in an epsilon of extra effort in a day and age where every team ascribes to a scarcity mindset. I actually believe I can have more impact building a medium-sized product by myself with the help of AI rather than fighting for scraps in a software organization which pushes and pulls randomly in all directions.
Over time, my tolerance for nonsense and systemic "injustice" (i.e. incentive misalignment) has effectively disappeared. Every time I rub against an unnecessary barrier that was put up by another person, intentionally or not, my motivation simply drops to zero. I constantly have to wear an emotional blanket to keep from feeling angry and frustrated, and it makes it hard to experience genuine emotional fulfillment in my life outside of work. I simply have no patience left to spend in my life outside of work, where it actually matters.
I 100% identify with this blog post. I feel more happiness taking a friend's kids to the climbing gym and listening to them tell me about their experience doing a difficult climb. I feel more happiness from mentoring a robotics team of goofy but driven teenagers. I feel more happiness when my writer friend tells me that she still uses a wooden tablet stand that I built every day. I want my life to feel like it's making a difference for other people in a way that is unique to my talents and skills.
Life is not an optimization puzzle where the goal is to maximize wealth, status, influence, or prestige. Yet it feels like that's really all that a corporate job can offer you these days.
engineer_22|21 hours ago
RickJWagner|1 day ago
One year, I had a superior athlete on my youth football team. A foot shorter than everybody else and skinny as a stick, the boy had the gift of speed. He’d run like the wind, arms and legs flailing wildly. It looked like he’d cover distance twice as fast as the other kids.
I took full advantage of the situation. Every game, I started by getting wonder boy the ball until we’d racked up enough points to be comfortable. Then the others got turns. We went the regular season undefeated and I began to convince myself I really had coaching talent. Maybe I could help out at the high school, or the local college! The sky was the limit, I was a natural.
Then came the championship game, also against an undefeated team. Their team had a wonderboy, too. He was actually faster than my speedster!
Predictably, their coach played it just like I had. Through superior speed, they took a healthy lead early in the game and never let it go.
I enjoyed all my years of youth coaching, but that year was just magical. Right up ‘till the last game. It was a memorable year.
jasleenchhabra|16 hours ago
iguhhyfchh|15 minutes ago
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abhitriloki|13 hours ago
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pppoiuy|1 day ago
santram|15 hours ago