Exactly, when you hire a junior engineer the distribution of code quality is fairly well known. By the time an engineer becomes senior, you can generally expect similar level of quality across any given task. Whereas with AI, sometimes the output is senior and in the middle of a task you'll get unpredictable low quality output. This makes the system both frustrating and unreliable. Now apply that to other domains like self-driving vehicles, where perhaps 80% of the time on a generally stress free freeway it does fine, and then randomly it may decide mid drive to slam on the brakes because of a random variance in the sensor stack.
For every interesting problem AI solves there are a long tail of really dumb things that AI performs that humans would never do. Some days I am in awe of one-shot magic eight-ball output and other days I'm so frustrated by the sheer stupidity of what it produces. It remains to be seen whether that long tail of stupidity can ever be resolved in the current form of LLMs.
I agree with most of this, I just have sort of turned a blind eye to what the code actually probably looks like. Reviews are rapid, and I’ll admit I do feel like I’m betraying my inner programmer by just optimizing directly against the claims of token bot. But the way I see it, as long as the numbers don’t lie I’m okay with the process.
Single greatest thing I did to fix my circadian rhythm was get a sunset/sunrise lighting alarm. I have some hue lights and a "Hatch" alarm clock that both do sunrise lighting and some light morning noise that gradually increases lighting early in the morning. Even when its dark outside, my body has accustomed to it so much that I didn't even notice day light savings at all. Best investment for myself and my daughter I've ever done.
I struggled with isolation for a long time but I found that there are some hobbies that have helped me.
- join jiu jitsu (people here are so supportive, it such a solid community and it gets you crazy active)
- join a church you like (believe it or not, there are great ones out there where you can find people that care about you the way God wants to have a personal relationship. In those communities people care about whats going on in your life and it gets your caring about other people. And as a bonus, people will put together pot lucks, bbqs, outings. Gets you in planning mode)
- I started reading books again, novels. Evenings without my family being together in a house alone was rough for a long while. I stopped watching shows in the evenings now and have a much more consistent bedtime routine that involves reading an actual fun book. This has gotten me out of my head, out of my laptop, out of the screen and enjoying stories again. Highly recommend!
If you're ever struggling, feel free to reach out. I am starting a discord server for this community because this seems to come up a lot and HN comments doesn't seem to be a great place to have consistent connection.
https://discord.gg/Hzu3UrthHn
The discomfort you feel is real but manageable. It's good news because you just need to be consistent in doing 1 small thing each day or each week. For me it was, I'm going to go to church and find a small group I'm interested in. Then from there I added in - I'm going to learn guitar and see an actual professional teacher to teach me so I have an in person contact with someone who cares about my progress. Then it was, I'm actually going to regularly have real phone calls with my family (my mom, my brother, etc). I have a daughter so it's much easier for me, but I also live remotely so there's that.
Welcome to late stage capitalism. Where non of the incentives have anything to do with helping people and reducing costs for things people care about - energy, food, healthcare, basic needs.
Every now and then I enjoy the opportunity to build things without planning around them. No ceremony, no tickets - just pure code and building things people are interested in or are looking to solve problems.
I'm in the same boat, this is a requirement to save for retirement and there's very little else that can compete - despite the fact that inflation is outpacing nearly all the efforts I've made thus far to have a reasonable retirement.