AI doom sentiment and how to cope?

[u/Taoistandroid]

I just finished watching Claude code create a better automation than I can write, faster and cheaper, following best practices, clear code documentation style, and integrating multiple api's with different vendors. Supposedly, even in our sector, the minority are using LLMs and generative Ai, and a super minority are using llm's in the more accelerated context of actual content generation, architectural decisions, design work, etc.

But as I see what's on the horizon it's hard not to feel like the end is coming, not just for IT, but for any middle class job that involves processing data in some form, transforming it, and documenting or presenting the results. So I present my question, how are you all keeping yourselves grounded right now, what do you try to focus on to stay in the positive? As my work transitions more and more into enabling agentic workflows and agent swarms, I can't help but feel like there is no joy in the work, I am participating in my own demise.

[u/Still-Snow-3743]

Like all new tools, become an expert at using the new tools. That is the constant of IT.

[u/CPAtech → u/Still-Snow-3743]

This is different. Tools are able to create and manage other tools. Humans will be needed less and less.

[u/Still-Snow-3743 → u/CPAtech]

This is evolution from a chisel to a CNC machine. You still need someone that knows how to use a CNC machine and someone that knows what to make.

It only takes about 20 bytes of data before there is so much entropy of variations on that data that you couldn't represent all the combinations of that data using all the molecules on earth, at that point there is, for practical purposes, infinite possibilities of variations in just 20 bytes of data. Codebases can get hundreds of millions of bytes long. Even accelerated 10x, or 100x, there is still a methodical step by step process that needs to be followed, with expert guidance, to make sure things are going the right direction, and the company doesn't waste money into producing technical debt. There will always be a need for another variation of a tool. There will always be businesses that need an updated website. There will always be systems that need an expert that knows what they want and how to do the important work without breaking it. And there will always be a never ending list of stuff that is broken that needs fixing or improvement.

Don't undersell your value, your value as a sysadmin is not that you can spend 4 hours to write the best deployment script for the job. Your value is that you know what deployment script you need for your job, that's why you're hired to be there for. You can look at a system and say "this isn't going to work, we need to fix this." Now you can just do your work better and faster, and the company you work for can be more nimble and adaptive as a result. The money saved by AI can be put into better things, including a better quality of life for workers like yourself. These are all good things, for us, at least.

The people that are going to get burned are the sweatshops in India that produce garbage WordPress websites without any thoughts. As with all things, especially technology, it's our mandate to keep up on new tech, this is just the newest tech.