Generative AI and the texture of life
Why are software engineers showing stress, fear, and anger about generative AI?1 Here's a partial list of bad things:
- Generative AI making software worse instead of better.
- Generative AI leading to lots of pretty-good software but less great software.
- Generative AI causing them to lose their jobs.
- Generative AI making them or others worse people (less creative, less informed, less intelligent, less connected, or whatever).
- Generative AI leading to the end of the world or other apocalyptic outcomes.
These are all bad.2 Some are very bad, and well worth worrying about if you assign any nontrivial probability to them.
But here are some other outcomes:
- You've grown to love your favorite IDE and debugger, and you're spending less and less time there.
- You're proud not only of your general know-how but also of the million little facts you've learned along the way. You think you'll never again have reason to actively, consciously use 75% or so of them.
- You found a happy, efficient structure of your work life. It involved low-opportunity-cost coffee. You might or might not keep that old structure, but its ecomomic-logistical structure is now archaic.
- There's a romantic aspect to typing out commit messages, doing the little valuable refactors you know so well, and so on. You'll miss the way they used to be.
You might think, as I do, that generative AI is a basically exciting and transformative technology, and that programmers should work hard to learn the new world and focus on all the new possibilities. You're still allowed to feel sad, or at least a bit melancholy, and not just because of big, macro-economic or apocalyptic, worries.
Here as elsewhere, beware mood affiliation. "I'm excited to build" does not just mean "yay generative AI." "I will miss parts of the old world" does not just mean "boo generative AI." Programmers are early to an experience many will have: of life's having an utterly new texture. There is every reason for excitement, fear, vigor, nostalgia, and annoyance to coexist.
Many engineers are feeling these but not showing them, and many are not even feeling them. But this post is about the stress and fear and so on.↩
Arguably it's not bad to trade off some software excellence for a ton of new functional software. "Tons of bespoke, good-enough software" is, I think, still an underrated success scenario for generative AI. People say sentences that suggest they think about this, but I often doubt that they have really imagined such a world.↩