A lot of people truly enjoyed the craft and creativity of building something

This is a wonderful comment, and I’m glad I scrolled far enough to see it. > Some of these crafts people may have never got to the point of being masters yet either, they were working their way towards it, but now it looks like those skills may not be valued by the market, did they waste their most valuable years working towards a goal that no longer exists? This is the tradeoff that hurts me the most. I spent a significant chunk of my 20’s learning new paradigms, languages, and frameworks. I thought I knew the tradeoff I was making. I thought any sacrifice now would pay off in the future. Instead, it seems like any learning outside of the first few years of my career was completely useless. I would love to go out on my own terms like you suggest, but unfortunately I have at least 25 more years in this profession before I can retire. If the profession survives that long.

You have channeled a great deal of my anxiety, stress, anger, and sorrow with this comment. Every day at my job I search for a chance to write some fragment of code by hand, a place where just for a moment I remember the joyous struggle to be a craftsman. I have the sense that you're right - musicians, writers, illustrators, actors, animators - they largely seem to hate the way the genAI companies vacuumed up everything that was meant for other people to feed the soulless dreck-vomiters. I wish I knew the way to unite the programmers who were and are craftsmen with the artists who desire well-crafted tools that respect their artistic autonomy and creative freedom. There could be some good cooperation there, if someone could solve the coordination problem. Thank you for sharing your thoughts - I empathize strongly and appreciate what you had to say. I hope your quest goes well.

It can be a bit sad scrolling through reactions to stuff like this and seeing a bunch of shrugs or outright dismissals of the issues highlighted in the article. But this was a nice breath of fresh air and gave me a bit of needed optimism. So thanks for posting this comment. My background is game development, so perhaps I'm not really in "tech" the same way but am more of an "artist" who definitely sympathizes with real artists. But that background definitely had me more scrutinous to what AI can do and how it can take over one's mind. Which is poison to an artist who needs to constantly figure out how to channel their experiences to bring out new creations. I'm still sadly on the "find a way to provide for myself and my family" phase, but I too hope to live a life like this. One for me and my loved ones, not to serve some coporate overlord.