Grieving my industry

This is post 1 of 1 in the series “talking-about-ai” I am sick of talking about AI — literally feeling sick and anxious when it comes up — but there’s something I need to unpack and find words for that’s more than boredom or fear. So here’s more words on the topic that I’m sick of. While a friend first showed me GPT 2.0 back in 2019, it was only February last year that it became a focus for me and my work. I read Harper Reed’s “My LLM Codegen Workflow ATM”, experimented with the early coding agent Aider, and it promptly became my team’s job to figure out how to help my company adapt to this future way of creating software. So it’s only been 19 months, but I’m exhausted. I know the old Upton Sinclair quote applies: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” The problem is, I’m not even sure which direction it applies in: am I avoiding AI because it’ll disrupt the career that’s been both enjoyable and highly paid? Or is…