I left the tech industry after 10 years because of AI

Literally never used it. I got by for several decades without it and now it’s atrophying peoples brains and convincing teenagers to kill themselves. I’m good.

As a grey beard, I never touch AI. My job knows it too. My manager accepts it but tells me to keep it quiet.

They put up with me because I spend 90 % of my current days helping the juniors identify and fix flaws from their AI generated code. The company pushes so hard to use AI, but there’s always something to fix and the juniors will never get that needed exposure for troubleshooting code.

I feel this. I’m looking for a job, and in the mean time I’m creating projects for my protfolio where I have to use proprietary crap. I use the AI model, the software company provided because I don’t enjoy using that software, but will have to for a living.

What I’m doing to keep my sanity is actually learning another language and contributing to a few projects that have banned LLMs. There are really good projects with good intentions and amazing maintainers who actually need help. They could use our help.

These are dark times, but I believe many meat proxies, and slop will end when the bubble pops. Not to bring US politics into this (I’m not even American) but this recent election result is going to make things difficult for those fucking companies to slither out of. Most of these companies (atleast in my country) are relying on the subsidized plans. When that ends/gets worse (which they will as AI agents are just subscription products), most of these deskilled losers might just move on to the next grift. Many won’t even bother or have the hardware (most people in my country can barely afford a PC) to run good models locally

I have hope. We lose only when we give up, Delusional ? Maybe

I feel ya. I’m a security tester so I get to face AI daily as well at my work.

Something depressing I’ve noted as well since the AI age is the (seemingly) complete death of curiosity. Some of the smartest people I know, now completely relegate themselves to become a manager to AI without even touching testing targets anymore.

There used to be a ravenous hunger for new, weird vulnerabilities and quirks in software that could be leveraged. Now they’re all just gloating about how they’re doing everything talking to a machine over discord.

I feel like the only weirdo that apparently actually liked doing the work. It’s sad.

Yep, it sucks. I feel for you. Now I need to get back to slopping it up at my job.

I know nothing about coding but surely there are degrees to AI’s use as a tool? I’ve heard it can produce slop but is it always necessarily so? I’ve heard people using it for debugging, that seems reasonable to someone with my level of knowledge.

Remember when one of your professors or mentors told you “Learn Fortran, all the old guys are dying and leaving desperate employers behind.”

What do you think happens in five years when no one is willing to pay to train models, the existing ones are no longer keeping up, and most of the industry has spent their time with a tool that actively declines their skills?

I’d like to think that’s at the end of this tunnel is a light that means the culling of bootcamp skids and should-be-MBA techbros from the jobs that should be for developers who are in it for the love of the game.

In the meantime? Yeah, its gonna be rough, sis.

Once had a IT job 15 years ago, but the growing uncertainty had me trying out learning the trades.

Hey mate! My recommendation is that you connect with humanist communities. For example, I’m at a forum called humancrafted. Connection and community is how we stay healthy in these trying times.

I hear you OP. I am a senior developer and hate my current employer. He is a miserly c*nt. Half of our people already left for better paying jobs. To make matters worse, he has recently joined the Claude cult. I am stranded in search of a new job, that does not include AI.

Our former junior has altogether left development, as there are hardly any junior vacancies anymore. He is flipping burgers now and earning better than he did at our company. He is replaced by Claude by my boss, so one salary less to pay.

As for myself, I can do one of two things:

• Find a new development job. It WILL include AI, which I do not want.
• Leave development entirely. At my age, almost every application is met with utter silence, even for related jobs for which I do have some experience.

I will be opening a very expensive bottle as soon as the bubble bursts.

Plot twist: we use AI and accelerate the downfall of our agricultural yields due to increased data centers (aka blow the climate crisis by so bad). You might starve either way.

I’ve worked in municipal IT my whole career and even during the latest big conference I attended the AI presentations were fairly tame and cautious.

Municipalities move SLOWW and most still don’t have a fully fledged out AI policy so no-one is forcing you to use LLMs. I do keep having to tell people that the ai answer they copy pasted to me is completely wrong so that’s fun lol.

Is is also nice to know that at the end of the day you’re helping someone maintain a city more efficiently for the people living there instead of enriching some corpo overlords.

Pay is ~15% less than industry average but the benefits tend to be good with great job security and hours.

It’s not always going to be like this. I genuinely think the AI bubble is going to pop and the whole way AI is viewed will change.

I was there for the dotcom bubble. When it popped the Internet didn’t go away, it just settled into the tool it was designed to be.

LLMs won’t be uninvented… they’ll just become tools.

I’m not in a computer science or software engineering field. I have been coding for a long time, started with turbo pascal, if that tells you something. AI (LLMs) is horrible for many things, especially writing things for humans, or generating “answers” for people’s questions about the real world.
AI agents are very good at writing code. If a human needs code for work, they are better off telling a well configured and prompted AI what they want done and how, than writing code themselves. There may be certain exceptions, mostly at the more sophisticated levels of performance-critical systems, but even then, AI will make the end product better by helping the human developer by writing and running tests, testing alternative approaches, etc. , because with AI assistance, the dev can simply get more of that done within the given timeframe.
That is all to say, I can’t imagine a job that involves writing code that doesn’t massively benefit from AI. It’s a tool that should be used. You should learn how to use it well, it’s part of your trade. Like you don’t hand punch cards to run machine code. You use an IDE, code completion, version control, linter, etc. You learn these tools as part of your education, because if you don’t use them well, you’re not good at your job. Of course if you code for hobby or whatever, this doesn’t apply.
The comments about after the crash… Agents for writing code will stay after the crash, like the internet stayed after the dotcom bust. Like rn I pay 20 bucks a month for claude, for work. That’s unsustainable, it will and it should cost more. If it costed $2000 a month, I would still keep the sub, without any doubt. Just for comparison, 3 years ago I got a quote from a data science consulting company to maintain a specific project for 30k a year- that didn’t include developing it. A single Claude pro sub is objectively better for us than what that contract offered.