Sorry that you're going through this and I hope that you will feel better soon. If it's any help, I agree with a couple of other posts here that we're going through a hype-wave regarding AI right now. I think we're right around the peak of it and things will settle down significantly after this peak passes. The AI industry is completely unsustainable (financially) and the news just the last couple of days show lots of signs that it's starting to wobble.^1^ I've read some pretty solid-looking analysis that predicts that the major AI companies are going to hit serious financial trouble starting 2027. Companies are currently thinking they can replace human workers with AI because AI is artificially cheap right now and because they also don't realize just how bad AI is at doing a human's work.

Maybe reading some prominent AI skeptical analysts would give you some more reason to have hope? Here are a couple:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/
https://pivot-to-ai.com/

1: Character.ai declared bankruptcy, Oracle's debt now requires a 15% interest rate, banks are trying to unload AI company debt that they're holding, Anthropic posted an $80 billion loss, CoreWeave's founders cached out to protect their wealth. This is just from the last week, from what I recall.

You sound like me, when I saw this coming back in 2017. I chose to get ahead of the wave by getting a degree specializing in AI, but I understand that isn't what you want to do. I disagree with some of the posts here, as I believe even my job will eventually be gone, but hopefully by that point our leaders will recognize that Universal Basic Income is a necessity to keep civilization intact.

My own depression comes from the certainty of climate change, and the future my kids will face. What I've decided, is that I'll appreciate all the good things in life, and so long as there's one good thing I'll persist. I try to focus on making sure my kids have the best life possible, without being outright spoiled, because I can't guarantee their futures will ever realistically be as happy.

There's always good, though. Good and bad are simply judgments you place on things. If you change your perspective, you can also change the appraisal of many things in life you would otherwise see as bad.

As someone also with a job in computer science, one thing I can tell you is LLMs aren't worth crap without a human who knows what they're doing at the steering wheel.

LLM isn't going to apply logic and solve problems in your place. At most, it can assist you, under strict supervision. Otherwise the result is just slop at best and catastrophic at worst.

The scientific accomplishments you've read about were achieved by humans utilising tools, one of which happened to be an LLM. There wasn't an LLM that one day just decided to prove a theorem out of the blue.

I'm not any good at comforting people, much less strangers on the internet I know nothing about. But your concerns and fears mirror some of my own, and I am convinced they can be overcome by rational thought and logic.

Someone who has studied hard and learned how to learn, as well as to problem solve, will always be in demand, especially in places that are already struggling to filter through AI generated slop their codebase turned into.

That aside, I wish you all the possible safety and well being. The most hopeful thing we can do is survive despite the broken world.

Hey dont lose hope. Getting into this kind of darkness is part of the world. It happened throught history and mankind survived. And in fact we need people like you, with knowledge and skills. Just imagine what would happen with all these issues you described. The world will be thrown off balance. There... Lot of people, I mean a lot will need help as a society to move on. There you can shine light to many. Support many. I know this may sound boring but it is true. I too gone through what you described. Still sometimes feels. But then we humans have the ability to imagine and dream. And then I thought yes, the life and luxury we see through the social media is not the real world. There is a bigger world outside. It needs you. I say always always sharpen your skills. When ai takeover it will not be able to do terminator thing. It needs energey and stuff. when corporates fails the ai and other stuff will fail. Then what happens to humans. We will only have our skills, if we have it. Also look at people, there are small shops, selling grocery and items, not making much profit coz of the mega corporations, but still they do and live. The world is a fighting place. Remember there are a lot of people fighting and will be beside you, we can support each other. Be happy. Focus on small things makes you happy.Learn life skills, survival skills, do small stuff, a small business even that will make your brain thinks that you can make it. Thats how we move on. my kidney failed. My wife donated to me otherwise Im a dead man. I decided to move on. You are young. The world have a lot you have to see and explore. This El nino will end by next year. So travel after that. Now, go watch some movies. Some old stuff, they can give some inspiration, like, Good Will Hunting, or Star Wars stuff, or that pop culture stuff Spiderman mentions to Stark. Be Happy. The world needs you.

I went through something very similar about 4 years ago where I finally (at the ripe old age of 28) had found a career in was excited about. It was automated, much the same as yours. I was crushed. I found other jobs where my skills could transfer. I don't love those jobs as much, and I'm still often sad I don't get to do what I loved anymore. It sucks. It wasn't the end of my professional life by any means. It was the beginning of a new one.

People often go through many career changes in their life. Last I remember hearing about it, it was like 4 per lifetime on average but that was like 20 years ago so I'm sure that statistic has changed by now. It will suck. It is not the end of the line. You will find other things to fulfill you in similar ways.

This will sound silly but whenever I go through these directional changes, I always fall back on a couple of OG redditors that got me through back in the day (poem_for_your_sprog and motivating_giraffe).

Penny's collection is still up and full of other wonderful art that has gotten me through difficult times: https://motivatinggiraffe.com/gallery/

I can really only echo support for what others have said - find things you enjoy and people you enjoy doing them with and.. Do the things. It's silly but it's so easy to get wrapped up online or in your head or in the news and neglect the things you enjoy (to your detriment).

I'm very skeptical that AI will replace anyone in computer science - it generates as many problems and bad code as it solves, i think it's comparable to power tools. Enables faster work if you know how to wield it, but can cause a lot of damage or just fast-but-shoddy work in unskilled hands.

Were living through the "oh wow, LLM can make things I don't know how to - it's magic" phase presently, and a lot of non-programmers are generating code that they don't understand at all. I'm pretty sure the next inevitable phase will be, "oh fuck, we have so many things that need fixing or improvements now.. And AI doesn't know how - and nor do i" phase. There will be a lot of programmers needed in that phase.

Hello name-friend.

I'm in a similar boat as you, just on a different timeline. I'm 10 years older, just finished a PhD in science/tech, I am autistic, trans (and "done" transitioning), and am concerned about these things.

One of the biggest aids for my mental health in all this was educating myself. Reading the news (or a Lemmy feed by extension) just isn't it. It seems to me like you have taken a lot of criti-hype to heart. Most of the stuff out there is just seeded to drum up investments. Unfortunately, everyone else gets caught in the crossfire too. This includes bosses, which is why this is all dangerous right now. However, it will not keep going like this.

AFAIK, the maths stunt relied on proof-validation from computer tools. Humans still need to check it, and much like LLM generated code it will be very difficult to check, because it is trained to look as valid as possible. Agents have even been caught cheating before, Nd they might have done so here too. Essentially its just a magic trick. If you are not in the know, it looks convincing. If even senior mathematicians to validate these things, then we most certainly shouldnt bother worrying about it. But these corpos of course will use every bit of plausible deniability to drive up their stock prices.

This is criti-hype. If you arent excited about it, you are dooming about it. But both are the same thing. Overhyping what these tools can do. With your CS background, you are primed to realise this for yourself too. You know about all of the knew problems and BS the agent-first workflows introduce. Be critical and angry.

With that said, I made a personal choice not to branch further into programming because of all of this. I just can't stand it. For you, retreating fully might not be an option, but you have a foot in. I think you will be fine. You were not too late. For me, even with a PhD, looking for junior positions at my age is tough. Ill have some other issues to figure out. But we will work it out for sure.

Good luck to you friend.

You could try your hand at a technical trade, something that involves your skill set. These things cant really be AI'd into oblivion.

• Lighting automation programming
• AV / Audio
• Security technician
• Electrical engineering perhaps?

Just the ones off the top of my head.

I'm in a similar boat, though I've been in the field slightly longer, and when the OpenAI Lean thing came out I too got pretty depressed for a while.

If it's any consolation, personally I feel like AI is really just fast-tracking the disillusionment and burnout I would have ended up with anyway -- I don't think corporate software development has ever really held much respect for the things I enjoy about programming. As you say, a working feature is a working feature, and it doesn't matter how elegant the algorithms are.

I don't really have any suggestions for alternative jobs (could use some though), but I will say if you're genuinely passionate about compsci I think it's worthwhile to practice it, even if it becomes nonviable within the capitalist system as a "career". You can write code (or homelab configs, or whatever) in any way you want, for any reasons you want -- it doesn't have to be tied to the corporate worldview of maximal value extraction. Things like live coding and demoing are pretty firmly within the realm of art, but people do them anyway, and have a lot of fun doing so.

Nature can help for me, to remember nice things still exist, and will continue to do so a long way into the future. I don't think even the billionaires will manage to destroy cockroaches.

Llms are garbage 20% of the time. It’s a tool to make you faster. There are going to be coder jobs out there.

You don't need a degree for many jobs and others pay more for simply having one. And no the jobs aren't going anywhere, they are just changing. Job market for IT sucks right now as we are likely about to have a bubble burst.

Probably time for you to get off social media and limit news intake. Find an offline hobby that you enjoy.