It pains me, deeply, that I have to see AI in this form. From very early age I was facinated by programming, my childhood dream was to create a chat robot. I studied machine learning and linguistics, and coded a lot. I used the local library, they had books but internet connection was too expensive for my family.

In my teenage years I was the token nerd, I liked technology, I liked new and shiny things (still too poor to afford any), and the progess we the humanity achieved together.

Fast forward today, I work for a multi, as a software developer. I did not chose this carrier, It was the easy path. I already love problem solving and coding, so why not, it even pays well. Now it is threatened, by AI. And by AI I mean LLMs, unfortunately research did not get founded by the artificial hype, it is the opposite actually. Some already betting that AI can do the research in the next X months/years. (claiming the same number no matter when you ask them)

It pains me that a project, which aimed to help cancer screening went under. It was developed by a bioengeneering/developer team. I helped by coding a lean AI which tracked cells moving in 4D in scans. (3 spatial 1 time dimension)

In my work, there was a greate engineer, we talked a lot, and shared ideas for hobby projects (yeah, true nerds 😅) unfortunately he had to go to work elsewhere. But some days ago, he got the opportunity to get back to our company, but joined another team. We were the only two person in the office, as it was pretty late. I striked a conversation, because I saw he is just watching an agent writing his code. Or so I thought.

(Sorry its get a bit techincal)
Someone created a change in the code, and forgot to change the unit test with it, so it is failed on the pipeline. He prompted an agentic AI to resolve the issue. I checked the changes, only some reworded variables, nothing that needs to modify the logic of the tests. I watched the running Agent: AI failed to run the environment, so modified the the main cmake, read at least 3 totaly unrelated source files, opened 36 terminal. Then 20 minutes later "solved" the problem. I did not watched him instructing the AI to commit the changes. The AI did. With the modified environment. Safe to say it broke the whole pipiline. The solution? Yeah ask AI what happend and fix it, make no mistake...
Another half an our later, he had 5 variable names renamed.

Same person. I sent him an article of a common intrest, the link to the pdf, and watched as he opened, copy pasted the title to google, and read the AI summary. For a fking article which has an excellent abstratct already!

I lost hope. Send me hugs.

Yep, hugs because I could have written that. I'm unemployed and I have a few choices now:

• send resumes everywhere (I have already sent more than 500 resumes without having a positive answer even after 3 or 4 interviews),
• become a freelancer but I will have to subscribe to an AI because they all want that,
• do something else like a physical job because fuck computing and fuck the internet which became a toxic place in less than a few years.

Anyway, I'm stopping writing open-source code "in the open" because AIs are stealing it, and for the future I don't know if I ever will write cool stuff again because the most basic Linux distribution has all the tools I'll ever need for the rest of my life.

Whatever happens, AI will suffer because it won't have new code to absorb, juniors will never be seniors, and fuck that shit. I'm not out yet, but the joke about buying a shed in the woods is starting to be very real.

Yeah I'm pretty much losing most of my IRL friends to this. Theyre absolutely clueless about tech and refuse to listen to me or actually study up on what theyre doing.

So I'm trying to surround myself with smarter people. I'm done being the newsbringer.

Uff, thats really tough. Hang in there! I was fortunate enough to land a job, mostly because ppl I knew from uni recommended me.

Jeah, I am pretty disapointed that AI learned to code on my projects. Sometimes I wonder if it poisoned the model a bit at least... I had everything published I ever written, should have kept them on the floppy.

I feel this, 100% :(