That just makes it feel like I wasted a lot of time. I spent years eschewing social gatherings, foregoing other opportunities, and depriving myself of things I enjoy, to cultivate a set of skills. Now I feel like they are rapidly becoming largely irrelevant (vuln hunting, kind of on the leading edge of ai displacement, not sure bug bounties as we currently know them will exist in five years time). What's more I don't feel like I'm positioned to remain employed in the field. I didn't expect my status or stability to be thrown into jeopardy so rapidly. I wish I were as selfless as you. I'm not sure many people are, maybe the world would be a kinder place if they were

that probably makes it feel even worse for most people

imagine spending years to develop mastery of something that anyone can do now? For example, sitting your ass down in college, debugging lines of code on a Saturday night while people are out partying? It's fun to do, sure, but there's still a huge opportunity cost.

It's easy to say that such people are prideful, arrogant, only cares about being better than others, but I think such a feeling sucks for 99% of the population that are not siddharthas.

All this supposed fun, is always something fairly simple that would take maybe a hundred or thousand hours of practice to build, it was never out of reach of them, they just felt they didn’t have the time or motivation to build that skill. (even a 1000 hour project can be done in 6 months outside of work time) Now they don’t need it. If there is any fun in this, it is an extremely shallow, garden variety sort of fun that comes from consuming content. They will never experience the deep fun that comes from being immersed creatively in a project, which I would trade anytime for something shallow.

This comment is the "Eat your broccoli because there are starving kids in China" of SWE.

We aren't suddenly seeing 10x the software output that these 10 joyful people are producing. I think it's more likely that 10x people are suddenly trying to figure out a way to low-effort scam money with AI. And a few of those people have teamed up with VC's to make AI products to scrape the bottom of the pond for desperate suckers looking to scam money. There's 10x the headaches for existing projects that suddenly have to deal with low-effort bugreps from people looking to show that they are now "expert software engineers" because they can write "go find the bugs in Project X" and an AI will possibly do that.

There are some interesting things being built by AI, but 10x the number of joyful software engineers ain't it.

[citation needed]