Came here to share the same general idea about using this as an opportunity to recognize when we've based our sense of self-worth on something external, and therefore out of our control and unstable. Which I also hope wouldn't come across as patronizing, though I can see how popping into the comments to say "I hear you're sad, but it's actually because you've failed at understanding yourself!" is far from seeming helpful lol. But the author uses a lot of language that directly signals this.
I'm navigating the same feelings as the author, though maybe to a lesser degree partially because I had to kind of reckon with this last year due to being laid off and burnt out. The thing that's helped the most by FAR is challenging myself to reframe my sense of self around things that being a Software Engineer was a mere _manifestation_ of, like being curious, creative, going deep on technical problems, trying to optimize things, etc. There are infinite ways to embody those tenets, and it helps to make the changes to our industry feel less existential without requiring me to feel like a different person, someone without a place.
This has recently become a pretty pressing issue for me, as it's starting to severely hinder my ability to be productive with the models. It's hard to tell if its getting worse with every model release, specific to Anthropic's models, a reflection of my ADHD, all/none of the above, but holy shit do I get aggravated when I'm forced to parse the most unintelligible, jargon-dense bullshit explanations in whatever the model output is. And then I feel silly getting genuinely tilted by the model's inability to just... explain something semi-normally, without it requiring me to berate it into simplicity.
For some discrete skills I use, I include a final step on the the output that runs through 1+ subagents to de-slop the text and to actually simplify it, but so far nothing has worked as well I've hoped. Considering hopping off Anthropic's models to try out others to see if they're less egregious.
I've been having a fantastic time telling it to use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (or use a skill for it, I've been playing with [1])
It's a very clear and understandable way of writing that puts priority on clarity.
It gets rid of the flowery language, the dense jaron, and the weird corporate marketing speak they tend to do. It is a bit repetitive, and it sometimes doesn't always wfit well in every situation, but for technical writing or explanations it's been such an incredible breath of fresh air!
This just might save me. Claude has been driving me nuts with incomprehensible summaries after a long task, where it's actually really important to understand what was done (and what wasn't).
But I'd like that skill to only be used at the final step, when it finishes something.
agreed with "the final step". I worry adding commands like these might affect quality of responses at each step, which then stack up to result in an overall worse outcome.
Yeah I hit this feeling with Claude one too many times and switched from Anthropic Pro to OpenAI Pro. GPT-5.6 so far has been a significantly better technical writer in my opinion, and it's much faster in conversations. My guess is that Claude's fantasy-jargon is a symptom of training failure, not a sneaky intelligence edge (I could be wrong).
Tangential but I use OpenCode with GPT-5.6 rather than Codex because I could not figure out how to require Codex to ask me before editing files. OpenCode UX is still imperfect though.
It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.
Yeah, this letter is just proof of (the by now long standing fact) of corporate power/corporate capture of American governance. Tons of popular protests against big AI? Makes no difference. Joint corporate letter about big AI? Possibly the government will do something.
If you support the ideas described in Nvidia's letter, you're going against popular opinion. Most Americans do not want to "make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available". Indeed, many areas of the country including the entire state of New York have enacted datacenter moratoriums, responding to the widespread public concern that we can't have too much AI or it'll drink all our water.
Yeah hard to imagine why people would object to rising electricity and gas bills, negative environmental impact on their area for the privilege of ultimately losing their job.
It's easy to imagine! What I find hard to imagine is someone who opposes the construction of AI datacenters while also having detailed opinions about open weights and identifying "American AI Leadership" as a laudable goal. We're not talking about local AI here, competitive open-weight models can't be run effectively on consumer hardware.
I’m kind of doing this right now for the first time as a founding engineer in a very small but tight knit team. On paper, I’m objectively in a less secure position, but holy shit is it nice to enjoy work consistently.
I haven't dreaded going to work in years. I also realized burnout is less about how much time you're putting in and much more about how that time is spent. And when I had micromanaging bosses every hour felt like 4.
They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.
Any why would I want to work as a prompt engineer? or with AI tech at all? when I trained as a software developer using my brain to solve problems with data structures and algorithms, not prompts. I outright refuse to do such a thing.
But the point OP is making is that it's entirely possible that the person doing this _does_ see it as them being as helpful as possible. That doesn't mean it doesn't suck, or that it isn't annoying, though. I dunno, just seems like a coin toss to me: was this backed by good intentions or not? Without other "evidence", assuming that it was well-meaning but misguided feels better for _both_ of us (at least in my experience).
>Having good intentions doesn't give a free pass to be obnoxious.
>Sure but that goes both ways in a conversation.
In the situation being discussed, is it even a conversation if one party is not even actively engaging with the other person?
Also, respect is earned not given. If you don't respect me enough to put time into communicating in your own words, you can punch sand because I'm not reading your AI slop.
I had a colleague I really enjoyed talking to. Until all the AI hype and them getting into that bandwagon. Now whenever I ask something I get a huge markdown response with unaligned ascii table or being told to ask <llm name here> instead (with much enthusiasm). I am sure they are not doing it with bad intentions or ignoring me. That said I still can’t help but find it cold though. I would rather prefer if they just ghosted my messages
No, but they obligate you to be kind in your response despite your annoyance. The other person was trying to help, but failed. Keep that in mind if you feel the need to correct them.
This is the sort of thing that only someone on the spectrum would consider doing in a professional setting, and they will end up getting coached by HR.
I felt this way VERY strongly last year and into the beginning of this year. I was definitely burned out, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t right in noticing a lot of the same stuff described in the blog post. I was dangerously close to trying to talk my wife into liquidating our 401ks to buy an off grid cabin and resign from modern life.
What helped in the end was seemingly some sort of combination of acceptance + commitment, plus a looot of reflection on the nature of mind/mindfulness. Basically, understanding that our planet is a roiling ball of material simply unfolding over billions of years, and any apparent boundaries between “me” and “everything else” (including all the stressful stuff!) is an illusion caused by my silly limited human capacity to understand and perceive.
Sounds woo-woo and silly, but it has changed my life and provided me a framework to hold both “modern society is a chaotic train wreck” and “the only thing to do is be present and kind” at the same time in a way that’s free of contradiction and completely obvious in hindsight. I hope you feel better soon, blog post author! you deserve to.
So, so much of human history is just us trying and failing to find reasons we're unique, as if uniqueness is somehow the source of value, meaning, or joy in life. We really seem to react strongly against the widening of our consideration for the experience of non-human life (or human life, if it looks just a little different).
I'm navigating the same feelings as the author, though maybe to a lesser degree partially because I had to kind of reckon with this last year due to being laid off and burnt out. The thing that's helped the most by FAR is challenging myself to reframe my sense of self around things that being a Software Engineer was a mere _manifestation_ of, like being curious, creative, going deep on technical problems, trying to optimize things, etc. There are infinite ways to embody those tenets, and it helps to make the changes to our industry feel less existential without requiring me to feel like a different person, someone without a place.
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