Why I dislike this timeline

I came into software development struggling and fighting. I wanted to be an architect, or an artist, because I could draw fairly well and had a knack for shapes and designs. Engineering was a safer choice, it would feed me in the future and it would allow me to make a decent income.

It is the safer choice, it has continued to feed me (on my own dime) for the past 8 years or so and it has allowed me to travel internationally (My first trip out of India was a work trip to Indonesia, thanks Halodoc!) and have a variety of experiences I wouldn’t have been able to afford on an Architect’s salary (we’ll never know if I would’ve made it big and I’ll argue it’s easier to make it decently big in tech as compared to architecture, atleast in the 21st century).

Point being, I came into this profession reluctantly but then when my first program ran, I felt the same vibe as when creating the first stick figure drawing or the first watercolor painting or the first village scenery (which was the only thing I would draw for years and still like to, now that I’ve seen new nature - from Kodaikanal to Vietnam). I could Program computers. I could write software and actually enjoy writing a program and see it do something and then improve it by hand by looking up documentation and correcting the if-else statement and understand how OOP works and learn a new programming language and be stuck at a mundane error which I could’ve solved 3 hours ago because it was just plain stupid.

My point being, I actually enjoyed programming, by hand, learning a few things on the way. I’m not going to change my profession, I’ll still continue to program because I genuinely believe that tech is a force multiplier and it will allow me to help build a better future, I hope. And I like not being poor.

I’m not a hater, I really like that we’ve created something that looks and talks like AGI in the form of a chatbot, and kudos to Openai and the creator of the transformer architecture for making something remarkable that passes the turing test in a breeze. I think it has great potential.

What I’m struggling with is the idea that now, for competitive advantage and for the mere fact that I have to upskill, I will have to use AI in my work. I am going to write less code than I did before, manually. I will supervise Claude (prefferred GPT) to make the necessary change, and most of the times it’ll do it right in the first try.

This doesn’t make me feel obsolete, I know now I have more power and speed than before. I just kinda miss the good old days of struggling with the code and then having the satisfaction of knowing that I fully understood it end to end and that I’ve created something out of nothing.

I appreciate the potential - that we would be able to find cures to diseases faster and find new protiens and maybe someone (I) will solve Bloom’s two sigma problem and maybe we’ll even see advancements in cancer treatment where every chemo drug can be customised to each individual.

But I also have a slight amount of fear that for better or for worse, AGI might make me obsolete. Maybe I don’t make sense, even I’m trying to wrap my head about what’s bothering me. And I am using AI to programme more than 60% of the code I write, which is not at par with how engineers at Anthropic and OpenAI do it but I’ll catch up. I am just a bit annoyed at the fact that the thing I liked most about being a programmer has been automated.

I will now have to focus on the big picture stuff and I hate the big picture stuff to be honest, I’ve never been much of a visionary but now I’ll have to be one, or there won’t be a spot for me at the big boys table where everyone has a friend helping them write code while they choose how to steer it. And the thing that I hate more than not writing my own code is being left out.

Oh, other reasons should be obvious:

• Epstine files
• Being 85 seconds from midnight
• Climate change
• Global water scarcity

it’s a big list.