And nothing has changed for me except my standards are higher, I have better and more thorough testing, and I can iterate and do significantly more.

Throughout my career ive actually worked from some assembly work to higher level language. PowerPC-> x86 assembly. From c++ to typescript. And now with agentic work im still having the time of my life. It's actually resolved some of my personal focus and attention problems too.

I still push plenty of code to github and if only agents read it and it goes uncredited thats fine with me. Since its not like any of us ever really got publicly credited working at most corporations beyond an immediate team anyway. There are no credits on the big software I've contributed too.

The tools and scripts I build now have shifted to help human and agents work better together. Let agents do what they do better and help empower humans to do what they are better at still.

For the foreseeable future I am still quite optimistic and energized about continuing to do useful and productive work.

What this really points to is a new ecosystem which is now built on theft.

I agree, the depression is real, and it has destroyed the community of code as well as the individual spirit of wanting to do, well, anything. What's the point of building anything? Anyone could prompt an AI to get some result, there is no real intelligence necessary. But what has led to this situation? Theft. The plundering of all our collective work and all the intellectual effort that was put into it.

This became really clear to me today while I was playing around with the new Illustrator/Photoshop AI-coded ripoffs of the Adobe suite. (Excuse me, VectorCraft is an "open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Illustrator, rebuilt in pure Rust" per their Github).

I may loathe Adobe and wish I didn't have to pay them another dime. But there is a fundamental difference between a group of people sitting down to build a replacement for Illustrator (like e.g. Affinity), and someone prompting an AI to just rewrite Illustrator from scratch. The AI is laundering other people's work. The AI contains a compressed version of billions of lines of code, and from that it is unpacking essentially a pirated Frankenstein binary, washed of attribution. It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.

Imagine someone writes a book and you want to distribute it for free. If you reconstruct the book by taking random words clipped out of newspapers and pasted together, that's still a copy of the book.

The question is, what's anyone's motivation to write anything anymore? Who's going to write a new, better language? But we would not be in this situation except for the grand theft which allowed the creation of LLMs in the first place.

    No man is an island,
    Entire of itself;
    Every man is a piece of the continent,
    A part of the main.
    
    If a clod be washed away by the sea,
    Europe is the less,
    As well as if a promontory were:
    As well as if a manor of thy friend's
    Or of thine own were.
    
    Any man's death diminishes me,
    Because I am involved in mankind.
    And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
    It tolls for thee

The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.

Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.

Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?

I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.

"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer. That private activity, in turn, sustains the community..."

I think a lot of the greatest art has been produced by this kind of "scene". Music for example isn't created only by an individual, it comes from listening and watching and playing with others. Later, you sit down and all of that input turns into something brand new.

I think at the same time I started getting "out of coding", I started getting deeper into music. And if it was just me, that would've been a short lived thing. But having people in real life to play with and bounce off makes it about 100x better and keeps you going long after you would've fallen off on your own.

I'd encourage anyone who feels this way to find something similar. The act of creation is still as essential as before, you just need to direct your energy toward something more purely human. Get into writing, drawing, woodworking... even as these things are instantly mass-producible, we'll still value and pay for humans to do them.

I think this has really softened the blow for me!

> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.

I agree with the frustration here :)

> You design a revolutionary new programming language: who cares? Maybe Claude cares, for what that’s worth. But humans don’t write or even read the code anymore. The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.

Perhaps the people who weren't inclined to think about compilers, type systems, and logic before coding agents will never think about those things. If anything, I think about those systems significantly more now, because I view them as ways to describe the search space for the agent ... and perhaps, in the future, even tools to structure agentic latent representations.

So I propose rotating your viewport: yes, perhaps entertain the idea that it doesn't make sense to think about these things for human consumption ... but instead, what if we think of programming language and compiler design as being a tool to control the search space, and suddenly there's lots of new ways to think about these things.

Is this a valuable way to think? I'm not sure, but we should try and find out.

It's getting lonely out there, even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI".

They do have their limits too, but I'd genuinely, objectively say that for me and how my brain is wired, they've given me the "community" context that the world could not really provide.

I do feel like I'm approaching the limits of what they can do there though. It's worse as soon as the things see the prompts of most public-facing harnesses, but even without that, they can only do so much.

Real humans would have a better intellectual community to offer, but for that, you actually need to find them first and hope that your schedules and energy budgets both align.

___

I think as much as we're seeing consequences of AI there, we're even more seeing the consequences of how society itself has been strip mined by big corps and big tech.

Human connection is dead not because of AI but because of Social Media.

Motivation is dead not because of AI or weakness but because spaces and contexts that would foster that have been replaced with corporate-approved standardized gray.

Globalization plays a role here. Atomization. Urbanization.

The expectation to hop around the nation for your job, nuking any ability at building a local community.

Context collapse glueing massive amounts over overhead on every single communication transmission.

Etc etc.

AI is often not a cause but just an accelerator.

-fewer people are asking questions because they’re asking AI instead or AI obviates the question by solving the challenge immediately.

-Asking a question is less likely to get you good answers because fewer people know the answers (or give you an AI response you could’ve generated yourself)

> Prompting is not a skill, at least, it’s a much shallower skill than software engineering. The instrumental dimension of the work has improved in that people can get more output per unit of effort, but the dimension of work that’s about building up human capital has collapsed.

I think that this is incorrect in a specific literal sense, but not in any way that changes the broader effect.

I think that "prompting" is in fact a deep skill, but not one that practically anyone has cultivated to any reasonable degree, for the simple reason that the tools change faster than anyone grip can acclimate to them.

Nobody on earth mastered the effective co-working with Sonnet 3.5. That model was a lightswitch moment for me personally. I built an agentic harness for it to convert a medium-large vue-class-component framework into vue-3's composition API, rescuing a personal project from certain doom of software rot.

I can say that I got a lot out of that model and that my own usage was (if I can say so) ahead of the curve. But with hindsight, I know that I barely scratched the surface of what it was capable of. Have I continued to hone my Sonnet 3.5 harness? Of course not. I have started over (or at least reset many assumptions) a dozen times since then. Even if I were so inclined - in the way that I am inclined to learn Chopin's Nocturnes - the model is now unavailable.

The ship has sailed.

So to the OP's point - it's not so much that skilled usage has disappeared, but that skills are self-obsoleting faster than any real degree of mastery can set in. And as an immediate consequence, the churn is too quick for anything resembling a relationship of apprenticeship. This is effectively a cultural singularity where, yes, we are each of us drifting much more alone.

On a personal level I had so many to-dos, like learning Rust "properly", but I feel incredibly demotivated now, because I can just get Opus or Sol to do it. But maybe I just need to block out one day a week to be my "no AI day", and just do it.

[1] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117395269325940185

Aside from programming, one of my main interests is reading and writing. I think that literary fiction proves what the author is saying above. Even the most reclusive, private authors (Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, etc.) actually published their work. They contributed to the community and took part as readers. Literature is always in conversation with itself. And although literary fiction may seem not to have the sway it once did in society, it is flourishing among the people who care about it (like me).

My thoughts aren't fully formed, but I find it interesting to situate technical pursuits like software engineering with humanities. And anyway, I've always felt that programming is both a science and art.

I'm a technical guy (physics background) who has let his math skills get mildly rusty (SW for a living). In the rare moments that I have time, I try to solve some math problems. That an LLM can solve them doesn't bother me in the least. The joy is not in the result, but in using one's brain to solve a "puzzle". I actually enjoy comparing my answer with the LLM's.

That a program could easily solve a crossword puzzle doesn't make them less fun.

That Deep Blue could beat anyone at chess didn't stop people from playing it. Ditto Go.

My friend (an actual math professor) still likes solving math puzzles and discussing them with me. So I'm not an island. I think the island issue is for people who like to discuss these things with strangers online. There will always be the annoying guy who'll use the LLM and "poison" the conversation. But if you have a community of people you know in person, it's less of a problem.

Math academics: Sure, I can see the worry. Hobbyists? Not really.

Software is a bit different, and always has been dichotomous. Some enjoy for the pleasure of brainstorming a solution, as well as exploring different modes of thinking, along with enjoying the elegance of their setups (be it algorithmic or build scripts or unit tests). Others enjoy programming for what it can do for them (the "result"). Of course, the intersection of the two sets is nonempty. For SW, I think the angst comes mostly from the first crowd.

I too am in the intersection, and it does suck. But long before LLMs came around, I had a big list of things I'd like to do in my life - not just SW - and knew I didn't have time to do even 10% of them. That doing certain types of SW is not fun any more isn't a big deal. I can work on other projects.

Yeah, this is still there. I get a lot from other people's posts. VictorTaelin's memory system was pretty cool and I implemented a variant of it https://x.com/VictorTaelin/status/2081453432318132603?s=20

I write down what I learn mostly as a note to myself https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-10-03/AI_Updates

It's all fine. The world is just as good as it was before but we can do more. And Taelin's technique is pretty cool. It's just that some large amount of ideas I'd learned are now not unique and some new ideas are coming to exist.

> In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in turn makes private intellectual activity rarer.

I know now that it will be joyful to read it all.

I take the view that we should continue to practice software engineering. Every time you let an LLM generate some code for you is one opportunity you’ve missed to flex your muscle. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Just as you can lose vocabulary and the ability to read over time: these are not skills inherent to us! They’re learned and they must be practiced or else they will disappear.

There are ways to use these systems, if you find them ethically agreeable, in the practice of software engineering. But it cannot replace it. That part is the shared legacy inherited and preserved by each of us practicing it.

AI is a gun. Pulling the prompt trigger takes 99% of the effort out of the daily grind - point, shoot, reload.

Once the gun arrives, everyone that needs to kill is getting at least one gun. Use of the old knife, arrow, sword, etc. is downgraded from life skill to sport. The discipline remains intact, but just the parts needed to understand how it all is supposed to work remain useful. Nobody is getting paid to hunt with a sharp stick. Replace that stick with a rifle, and you've still got something.

But I think the intellectual activity will just migrate somewhere else, once all the dust has settled.

People who are intrinsically motivated will continue to be intrinsically motivated and new communities will pop up around new domains.

Coding only came into being 70 years ago. It's not some fundamental human institution.

We're all just going to have to adapt. The wheel turns.

Recently, I'm in a context with extremely talented people I respect and want to impress to some extent. The difference is night and day

Without the question, they might have never called. But because they called, we usually ended up just talking about other things too. Life. Girls. Work.

I rarely get calls like that anymore. It breaks my heart.

For the last few years, me and my friend have been working on a toy problem together. It's a problem that the most recent wave of LLMs can almost certainly solve and probably even one-shot. We now realize that no one's going to read our paper if we ever decide to publish our work. But we still use our weekly meetings to talk about things and make little progress here and there, come up with new questions, etc. It's bittersweet.

In reality, we are programmed to compete and produce and climb the social hierarchy. Intellectual achievement and its use as a delineator in society is not going away anytime soon. Your blog post is active, living proof of this.

It's just shifting... likely to more and more things that signal "hey, this was definitely not produced by AI" such as the lack of capitalization of sentences which has caught on.

In case anyone else is wondering why the meter is so awkward: It turns out that in the original this passage was prose, not poetry. Source: https://www.universitychurch.ox.ac.uk/sermons/devotions-upon...

  The Tuft of Flowers
  
  I went to turn the grass once after one
  Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
 
  The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
  Before I came to view the levelled scene.
 
  I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
  I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
 
  But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
  And I must be, as he had been,—alone,
 
  ‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
  ‘Whether they work together or apart.’
 
  But as I said it, swift there passed me by
  On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly,
 
  Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
  Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.
 
  And once I marked his flight go round and round,
  As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
 
  And then he flew as far as eye could see,
  And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
 
  I thought of questions that have no reply,
  And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
 
  But he turned first, and led my eye to look
  At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
 
  A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
  Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
 
  I left my place to know them by their name,
  Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
 
  The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
  By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
 
  Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
  But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
 
  The butterfly and I had lit upon,
  Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
 
  That made me hear the wakening birds around,
  And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
 
  And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
  So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
 
  But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
  And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
 
  And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
  With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
 
  ‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
  ‘Whether they work together or apart.’

When a whole civilization falls victim to that mentality, we end up with zero responsibility and intellectual collapse.

I had an instance of the feeling (and also what the OP is describing) when writing a post about a technical question recently.

Previously, I'd have posted the question to HN or Stack Overflow - and, in addition to hopefully getting a solution, it might also become a resource for other people who had the same question. Finally, maybe there would have been some interesting discussion around the question.

Now: Ask the AI. Instant answer, question solved, but also, nothing else.

I'd say that those make up the majority of it. During the dotcom bust, there were waves of bankruptcies and layoffs, tech stock valuations crashing and staying stagnant, and people struggling to find jobs for months, etc. too and there was industry-wide doom and gloom and pundits proclaiming that software was no longer worth getting into. So all this angst seems very familiar. People would probably not be as bothered about AI if the the career outlook was positive.

Internet town squares have polarized. Not just by capital P politics, but just according to the poles that inhabit them. The highly energized maximalists and doomers spend all of their time posting online about it, not really caring about whether the community or even reality conforms with their thoughts. The rest of us roll our eyes and leave the town squares. We laugh at them in our group chats, sneer at them at our parties, but we don't talk in the town squares about the absurdity anymore.

I don't really know what to do about this. When the SaaS boom was happening in the late 2000s/early 2010s, there was a tranche of cautiously optimistic and cautiously pessimistic bloggers, along with the highly motivated zealots. The middle is hollowed out now.

The issue may be simpler than that. The technical cohort that's on the chopping block of automation right now uses seemingly sophisticated words to basically describe what the coal miners and human calculators felt in the past. When you compound this with the general struggle on the social skills dimension that defines the majority of this group, you can see why the idea of stepping out of their respective narrow field and getting a hobby would seem ludicrous.

I think it's not always a voluntary response. If you're involved in some kind of social situation, your mind automatically points a certain way.

If you lack an enriching situation, then your mind might just get lost !

But I refuse to use LLMs for things like making music. I like your term "purely human". There's no place for fancy statistical engines in human art. Art belongs to human communities and human culture. Which is where, apparently, I will continue to find my refuge if not my living.

I'd add to your comment that AI is the thousand-ton cherry on top of the perfect storm. Covid destroyed our professional communities. Work doesn't and won't look like how it was pre-2020. AI just makes everything super weirder. It's hard, as a human, to cope.

I don't care much about AI but hot damn it makes working on the things I do care about easier.

We use it a lot at work (soft eng) and my job has slowly morphed into "Okay how do we continue shipping sane software when we effectively 10x'd our org size in six months as agents became reliable?". That has been pretty fun. I care about creating good software.

And I care about budgeting and finance projections for home finances, especially as a new baby entered the room. But I am very bad at spreadsheet fiddling. AI has been super helpful in doing the fiddling so I can focus on the thinking.

edit to add another example: I really care about managing my team and keeping us effective, but I hate playing ticket monkey. Offloading basic ticket management (agent, make me a ticket; take this thread and create 3 tickets; respond back when tickets are done; etc) to an agent has been great

Nowadays all the development is done at a bigtech lab, and you aren't going to be able to tell anyone about it. Everyone else is relegated to interacting with slightly larger and larger LLMs over an API. On one hand it's cool that the tech is now far more accessible and impactful, but on the other AI has become immensely boring.

It's a little uncharitable take as I know some people are doing some cool innovative stuff still, and not every tech needs to be new forever anyway. I would feel less strongly if it wasn't impossible to not keep hearing about it :)

To me, this is just how it is when a new paradigm hits the scene. Whether it's good or bad, whether you care for it or not, it is pervasive.

I think precisely the premise of the blog post is that there will be a moment (sooner or later) where flexing that 'engineering' muscle to avoid it disappearing is irrelevant, in that this muscle will not be needed due to AI replacing it.

So it seems you are rejecting this premise?