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2 hours ago
1
Everything seems to be changing quite rapidly lately. Things that I thought were cornerstones of life, things that would never change even when I’m 80 years old. Things on a worldly scale, but also things on a personal scale. All these things combined have caused me to feel quite lost, and I’m not sure yet how to fix that.
It all started a while ago, when both my parents passed away in a relatively short amount of time. Going into that would be a whole article in and of itself, but suffice to say, I’m definitely not over it yet. Although our bond had been deteriorating for many years before they died, I never truly realized how much I just implicitly relied on them being there. Certain pieces of knowledge about the world, though easily knowable on my part, I would also go to them first. Whenever I did something of meaning or value in my own life, like going on holiday or getting a promotion, I would immediately feel the urge to tell them. That urge hasn’t really gone away, even though they have. It’s left a void in my life that I don’t know how to fill. I always assigned higher value to other people’s values rather than my own. So if someone close to me values it highly to do financially well, that becomes a surrogate goal I can adopt for myself. It’s how I started off my life — my dad got me into software development by signing me up to a university’s CS program. I had absolutely no ambitions at that time and probably would have just become a factory worker or a bus driver, had my dad not started me off the right way. And I am extremely grateful to him for starting off my software development career in this way, because I’m sure it saved me from so many potential problems I could otherwise have had in life.
However, I think, right now, software development is going through the biggest ever change in all of its short history. LLMs — Large Language Models are upending the entire industry. They’ve upended writing and art, and they are currently changing the entire world of software development. It’s impossible to assign a value judgment to, I think, because it’s inevitable. It’s as big a change as going from horses to cars, or from petroleum lamps to electricity. We will no longer have to write code ourselves, ever again. Unless we want to. In professional software development, all you will need to do to solve a business problem is to write a spec for it and sic an AI on it for a night. Who cares if the code is maintainable or elegant? You asked the AI to write tests, so if the code breaks in the future, just tell the AI to fix the tests, and write some more tests while you’re at it. More code has never been cheaper, and it will only get cheaper in the future.
That doesn’t mean that software development as we currently know it will go away. In the same way that painting, drawing or creative writing won’t go away, programming will still be there for those who take an interest in it. But I don’t see it having a place in a business any more, for the same reason that businesses don’t employ craftsman woodworkers to build elegant desks for their offices — the mass-produced way is quicker and produces the minimum viable quality required for a business to thrive. And that’s a shame, because being a craftsman — producing elegant code, is exactly what I enjoy about being a software developer. And that, unmistakeably, is going away. We’re not quite there yet, but things are changing so quickly now. I think the timeframe for writing code by hand to go away entirely in the businessplace is somewhere between two and five years away. Elegantly handcrafted code will no longer provide value to businesses because LLMs won’t need code to be elegant, or if they do, they will be able to produce it faster than humans can. Software developers are relegated to supervisors and “prompt engineers”. I cannot imagine a world where such a job would bring me joy.
And that’s a huge change compared to five years ago. Five years ago my strongly held opinion was that the world would always need software developers that are capable of quickly learning new frameworks and writing quality, robust, maintainable code. Now, I believe that is no longer true. Craftsmanship is no longer necessary in the workplace, and if I went back into business world after a ten-year break with that attitude, other ‘developers’ would laugh me out of the room. I would spend ages getting up to speed with a codebase and even more time coming up with elegant abstractions to build out whatever feature was needed, only for a junior dev to do it in a third of the time using prompt engineering, and with better test coverage. The craftsman has become obsolete. Programming will be relegated to a hobby. It’s good for productivity, but I am sad nonetheless. My future is insecure. If I take a ten year break from professional life, I will have to learn entirely new and unknown skills if I would want to come back.
There’s another reason why taking that professional break is now more of an unknowable risk than ever: the world economy. For all of my life, the commonly held wisdom was that if the US does well, so does the world economy. The dollar is the world’s reserve currency, investing in the S&P 500 will get you good returns, or if you want less risk, US bonds will get you through as well. Trump is changing all of that. I’ve never seen the world’s confidence in the US economy any lower than it is now, and the US is actively working to alienate even more of the world. Europe is already not happy that all of the software and hardware they’re using is entirely dependent on US companies. And with ever-increasing tariffs, more and more countries are wondering about whether the ups are worth the downs. America’s actions are destabilizing the global economy and the status of the US dollar as a reserve currency. At the moment, I see this as a fairly huge problem for deciding how best to invest my savings in the long term. So far, I used to assum that the instability was because of Trump and Trump alone, rather than the general zeitgeist, and that the next president would undo some of the crazy stuff that Trump has started. But now.. I’m just not sure. Previously I might have had 90% confidence that sticking with US stocks and bonds would always be a safe bet for the rest of my life, now that confidence has dropped to maybe 70%, and it will drop a lot more if the next president doesn’t actively undo any of the damage that Trump has done. That’s scary, but what’s even scarier is that I wouldn’t know where else to invest my money. Where do people flock to when they decide that the USD is not safe any more? I have no idea.
All of these things are what is making me feel lost. I never really enjoyed professional software development because I see building software as a craft and a skill — an end rather than a means to make money. So far, in my career, I have been able to put my craft to good use, because my craft resulted in business making more money. But I don’t believe that is still going to be true in the future. Another reason that I am still working in this industry is that it pays really well. I want my early retirement. I want to pivot my life. But now, because of the economy, the risks of retiring early are suddenly much larger, and because of LLMs, by job satisfaction in putting up with a job that I already didn’t like much has become even lower. Lastly, with my parent’s death’s, my strongest form of external validation has gone away. I really am doing this all for myself, and I find it much harder to motivate myself for things that I want, compared to doing things that other people want.
I don’t know where this is all going. Everything is in flux. We’re all riding the same wave, and we’ll all just have to see where it takes us. Past solutions aren’t a guarantee in a changing world. We must stay flexible.
