Bit of a story of negligence, ignorance, and laziness. I can't say I have much of any sympathy. There were multiple steps that they could have intervened and chose not to.
I think it's time for me to move on from Raycast. It's decent, but I genuinely hate this direction. Shove AI in to every orifice, doesn't matter if anyone wants it.
I guess they're trying to make more money and Raycast is a bit of a dead-end there.
I quite like how archaic it is. I am turned off by a lot of modern stuff. My shell is nice and predictable. My scripts from 15 years ago still work just fine. No, I don't want it to get all fancy, thanks.
For a while, there was a strong trend of "I want to do everything in one singular language". Your coding is in language XYZ. Your build tools will be configured/written in XYZ. Your UI frontend will be generated from XYZ. Everything will be defined in XYZ.
Shell is from a time when you had a huge selection of languages, each for different purposes, and you picked the right one for the job. For complex applications, you would have multiple languages working together.
People look at Bash and think, "I would never dare do $Task with that language!". And you'd be right, because you're thinking you only have one tool in the toolbox.
The odd thing I find with folks championing AI, and those who have effectively laid themselves off from their own job and now are basically just glorified prompt engineers, is that you're just making yourself obsolete.
AI will get better so much faster than you can adapt. One day you're happily vibe coding your 50th app, having other agents do your work for you. The next, you're worse than AI and you're redundant, and the clock is now ticking on your own head. This whole thing has shown that orgs don't care how the work gets done. If it's done by a human, cool. If it's done faster by an AI at a satisfactory level, even better.
Soon, though, the human won't be needed in that loop.
How do you make yourself useful here? What defense do software engineers even have? We can run alongside AI, try to outrun it, but it's just about futile. I work with junior devs at work and Claude is easier to instruct than them, and produces better code. In some ways it's more pleasant to work with, too.
This isn't really me shitting on the juniors so much as trying to raise how fucked we actually are. Sorta just feels like we're in this phase of pretending it's all happy as a coping mechanism for the future pain.
I agree, with one small correction: it's not only software engineers that are going to be affected, it's a very large chunk of the white collar class. Does no one think what would happen with the economy if the people that consume the most (the middle class) slowly disappear?
Yeah, if this is going to be a nuclear bomb for software developers, imagine what it's going to be like for people in customer service, account managers, etc.
Yeah, I suppose I limited it to software devs since this is HN, but other industries will definitely be hit harder.
I guess factory workers felt it when robots started appearing, and there are many other similar examples of tech eating entire classes of worker. Except we're so deep in this coding rabbit hole that I dunno where else we end up.
don't worry! you can get a few insecure part-time jobs in the retail and/or services industries, and perhaps supplement your meager income with the gig economy TM
I honestly have no idea. We're stuck either way. I don't know what to do. What do you do if all you know is code and you're helping yourself out of a job whether you like it or not?
If you don't use AI you'll fall behind. If you do, you're accelerating your own redundancy.
I wouldn't consider myself a champion for AI. If you read my comment history you'll see that. I don't preach its wonders or pretend that we're all happy-fluffy in this world of ours. I mostly write my own code, use AI for review and to handle the trivial boring bits. I do use AI to build random tools I'd never want to take time away from "real" work to build, like helper scripts, nice TUIs for manual processes, etc. I do recognise the irony though.
I can sympathize. If you feel you’re in limbo, emotionally, and feel helpless, it’s natural. I’m in the same profession and what you’re experiencing is not unthinkable but sometimes depending on one’s life conditions, everything might seem more daunting than it should. I believe talking to a professional about this may help. I’d do the same.
One thing I can say is that if we, as a collective of white collar workers gonna lose our jobs fast, then I wouldn’t fret much because it won’t be on me alone to fix it, it’ll be a large chunk of humanity’s problem. Revolutions and uprisings have ensued far less dire situations.
I wouldn’t call it limbo, and I don’t think I need therapy for this. It’s more like, the future is so uncertain but all signals are pointing in one direction.
Sure, you can say that you won’t fret much but if you’re in a place without much social security, you’re not going to have a safety net. The revolution might not be in your benefit either, if there is one, which would only come when more people have their AI bubble popped.
The wording is all nice, and at surface level it reads well. It still makes me feel super icky. Kill 4k jobs because people are more productive with AI. Fuck the people, push the profits. Make investors happy.
No, fuck the investors. Fuck the entities causing these decisions to be more common. Extra-fuck the ever-more-obvious push for profit over literally anything else, including ethics, morals, and humanity. If you're an investor causing this shit to happen, fuck you.
Somehow this makes me feel that this org is already dead, and that this is just gonna accelerate it.
The brand you chose for daily consumption advertises "3X MORE CAFFEINE - NEVER SLEEP AGAIN."
In this instance I would honestly say that this choice of coffee, with so much caffeine, is a large contributor for why you had such a withdrawal. Your body probably ended up with a dependence to some degree because that's so much caffeine that it can't sorta just ignore it or manage around it.
More moderate consumption is more tolerable and often doesn't produce the same negative effects after you stop, though for some people it still does.
It's probably fine to have a coffee when you're craving it, couple times a week. Perhaps stick to a typical bean rather than nuclear-grade like you're used to? :P
Gamifying Claude Code? Why? A leaderboard of who can blow the most tokens/money? Sure, but it's trivial to make number go up. Very likely that the tool itself is vulnerable to just submitting data yourself. I find this really, really weird.
Thank you for putting my feelings into words. "Really weird" is exactly how I feel. AI output in our work should be measured in engineering progress, not in use metrics, right?
i think of straude as serving a similar role as habit trackers and github's contribution graph. some of us have a goal to use claude code daily, like how others might run or play the piano daily. it can be encouraging to do it with friends' support, see your progress visualised, etc. diff strokes for diff folks!
I get that. I do hope that this sort of thing doesn't induce artificial anxieties, where you feel like you must do something even when you don't want to or can't. It's also a really easy way to kill the fun of something and later avoid it or associate feelings of anxiety with something you used to enjoy
i’d say more projects that i wish existed + closing the taste gap btw the bar i have for products as a user vs. what i’m capable of creating as a builder. something like “token generated” is ofc only a proxy goal with no guarantees of quality. nevertheless it might be useful to some, like how writers set daily word count quotas for themselves
sort of what happened when that cc tool that displays total token/costs was released.
people on reddit and discord started actively competing for who had the biggest numbers when really you could effectively 'win' by making the thing spit total gibberish.
Good story of what not to do though
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