Dark Forestry

And frankly, my optimism for a better fate falters: The organized labor revolution never came. Workers walk a razorwire between rising costs of living and companies with bottomless coffers for legal violence, and for most of us, the risk is too high to try. Protests against the ecological impacts, or the extractive nature of the tooling and the work, or the ultimate impact to labor, are made to individuals — turning our ire against each other instead of the forces that demand we adapt adopt or die. It’s hard to fault people willing to compromise with these tools and their makers: as we’re finding out more than ever before, it doesn’t pay to stand on ethics. Gotta pay the bills.

Optimism as a whole feels like it's at a premium nowadays. The job market is tight and the industry is going through a massive change which feels in many cases to be the antithesis of what we developers have been doing our entire career.

For technology, I don’t think there’s gonna be any going back. The jury is out for other industries, but at least for us computer freaks, especially those at companies well-funded enough to easily weather the changing cost of tokens, I don’t think most will be seeing a future without prompted code. I think there will always be real creatives & sickos in this industry who write amazing things by hand and properly innovate, and there will be prompt-maximalists who gastown their way through the 9-5, and there will always be folks who came here because it’s a paycheck, and find some balance between the two.

Changes brought on by AI and LLM tooling is hitting developers hard. It's something that's not going to be going away. It's a matter of figuring out how to integrate LLMs into workflows and how to differentiate yourself.