This post is focused mainly on my own personal feelings and impacts but don’t think I don’t also see the broader societal impacts. I’ll touch on them too, but mostly this is just my personal perspective. I figure it may resonate with others given that Lemmy has so many “tech people.”

I have a “safe” software job which for years I’ve considered quitting in order to improve my mental health. I have been saving money for a long time. Prior to LLMs slowly automating jobs like mine away, I felt like I could quit, take a couple months off, and then find a better job. Maybe even come back to the same company after some recovery from burnout. It’s taken several years to feel able to do such a thing.

Today, however, I am afraid to do that. I am worried finding a job will no longer be somewhat trivial like it was a decade ago. There will be less software jobs, and the ones that exist will be pushing LLMs on their devs hard. My current job is doing that, less overtly than many companies would, but I am feeling the pressure.

So besides the feeling of having my options eliminated, I’m feeling actually likely to be laid off in the next few years, so I’m “lucky to even have it”. In the meantime, there is a malaise in the air on my team. People are using LLMs for work but I think most everyone has pretty mixed feelings about it. Especially given the climate impact we’re setting in motion.

Then outside my workplace, it feels like the general population is engaged in a mass psychosis. Many people genuinely are convinced that slop is good enough for most things. I know that teachers are using it to create shitty lessons in schools, and students are using it to avoid doing work. There literally is no chance that society will not see a slew of very negative consequences from this.

The creativity I expressed in my work is being devalued and stolen and I cannot even feel safe taking any time off or can find another job without a lot of pain, or any solace in the fact that I should be set for retiring without much worry. I know that it was a privilege to have ever felt able to take off, however it feels bad for that opportunity to have been taken away by ruthless capitalists pushing shitty robots on every living human.

I’m thinking about all this a lot, and it’s hard not to. It sucks. That’s all.