Lose Myself

I don't know what depression feels like for other people, but I can tell I'm headed down into the muck when my internal monologue turns against me. It's got a handful of phrases that it repeats over and over when things start to go bad, and one favorite is "Nothing you do matters."

I've been getting that one a lot lately. I know, rationally, that it's not true. A lot of what I do matters, to my family and my friends and myself. But, you know how it is: this is my mental illness; there are many like it, but this one is mine.

Why this particular phrase at this particular time stings so much is because it's not entirely untrue, specifically with regard to my profession. I'm a computer programmer, see, and there has been a lot going on.

AI.

Sigh.

They rhyme for a reason.

I'm not talking about the the razor-sharp edge, where people eagerly bleed, running AI-based agents that free them from the burden of responding to e-mails from their friends. (Or people who were formerly their friends, given they don't rate an actual response.)

And I'm not talking about the churning, smoking, shambling software production stacks inspired by dystopian hellscapes. (The Mayor of Gas Town is literally named "The People Eater." Little too on the nose there, pal.)

And I'm not talking about the grand philosophical debates from our deepest thinkers and our best minds, if computers have risen to sentience, to consciousness. (Spoiler: No. Don't be stupid. Jesus.)

And I'm not even talking about the moral, ethical, social, environmental, or economic impact of AI, because nobody else is either. Boooring.

What I am talking about is being replaced, about becoming expendable, about machines gaining the ability to adequately perform a very specific function that was previously the exclusive domain of skull meat.

What I'm talking about is that nothing I do matters. That nothing I can do matters.

In just the past few months, what was wild-eyed science fiction is now workaday reality. I've been dubious about the prospects of LLMs creating code (and lots and lots of other things) for as long as they've existed, but it's hard to argue with the latest wave and their abilities from a purely practical, purely capitalistic, purely ship-something-anything perspective -- the perspective that pays the bills. I've seen self-professed non-technical people bring functioning code into being, and that bests a significant number of actual humans I've worked with.

The legend has John Henry -- the very best in the world -- winning his battle against a machine, only to lose the war by, y'know, dying.  And I sure as hell ain't no John Henry.  How many steel-drivin' men take one look at their new opponent and just walk away? How many are making the right decision by doing so?

There are a thousand factors at play here (most of which are still in motion) but for plenty of small-scale, snap-together projects, something like Anthropic's Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex will be good enough, for economically-viable values of both "good" and "enough." They'll either burp up scripts that simply wouldn't exist otherwise, or do (some of) the work of (some) junior or mid-level coders (somewhat) faster and cheaper. But the direction things are headed seems pretty clear.

Is the code any good? I don't know. Who cares? Nobody looks at it anyway. AI produces a result, and results are what matter, and if you're waiting for quality to factor significantly into that equation, I've got some bad news about the last 40 years of professional software development for you.

There are plenty of people I know -- they're not all professional programmers, but most are; people I respect and admire and envy -- who have enthusiastically embraced this particular steam engine. Paul Ford wrote a wonderful essay about both his qualms and his excitement -- Qualms: 4, Excitement: 6, final -- and if what was being replaced wasn't the basis for my definition of self, I might feel the same. I can ignore moral, ethical, social, environmental, and economic externalities just as well as the next guy.

But I am a programmer. Just like I'm a father and a husband and a son and a friend. It's not something I do, it's something that is fundamental to the core of my being. Like overly dramatic phrasing.

I got into computers because solving puzzles was fun, and building worlds was fun, and making things -- the process of making things -- was fun, down at the granular level.  It was nice to have something at the end, but the act of creation was the exciting part.  I suspect that predilection will begin to disappear (in commercial environments, at the very least), now that the people who do it -- who want who do it -- can be replaced.  The journey actually was the reward for some subset of weird little freaks, but you can now skip all that crap and just jump to the end and get on with it.

People will argue that speaking English to LLMs is just another level of abstraction away from the physics of how the machine actually works. And while that's technically true -- the worst kind of true -- it also misses the point. Industrialization fundamentally changes things, by quantum degrees. A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream directly into your mouth while standing in front of the fridge at 2:00am. The level of care, of personalization, of intimacy -- both given and taken -- changes its nature. Digging a trench is a very different thing that telling someone to dig a trench. Assembling a clock is a very different thing than asking Siri for the time.

I was lucky enough to have a trench-digging enthusiasm when it was economically advantageous to do so. I managed to pretty much exactly hit the window when deep-nerd brain chemistry could produce a viable, even lucrative, career.  I am fortunate to be able to lean into an early senescence and walk (or be pushed) away, as what I want to do and what the world wants me to do diverge.

It still makes me sad, though, that what I've spent 45 years of my life toiling at will likely end up as a footnote, the providence of folksy artisans and historical reenactors. I didn't leave a dent in the universe so much as splatted against it. The world no longer has a need for what I somewhat sardonically call my art. We are all product managers now, pleading with obtuse underlings to go back and try again and to get it right this time. I remain a father and husband and son and friend, but the need for what I can do -- the need for what programmers can do -- is shrinking, and my conception of myself and my usefulness along with it.

There will be more software than ever, as its production is automated; we are entering the industrial age of the digital age. But less of this code will be elegant, or considerate, or graceful. Less of it will be created by removing what isn't David, and less of it will be driven by a human understanding of human needs.

That was something I did that mattered. I'll miss it.


 




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