🤖 AI is making some people—not everyone!—sad
Mondobe, on October 2nd, 2026: AI Makes Me Sad
Am I allowed to say that? Because it does.
Maybe it's because I'm writing this at 2:00 AM, which is about the only time I let myself experience sadness for a prolonged period of time, but every time I see a post on Twitter or LinkedIn about a new development in AI, I feel a sense of hopelessness.
And I'm saying this as someone who is absolutely in a position to benefit from AI. If I added a few vibecoded projects to my resume, the gaping maw of every startup, enterprise company, and FAANG behemoth would open to me. Just the other day, I sat near a table of my fellow TAs as they discussed their plans to work at OpenAI after graduation, eyeing $500k salaries.
But I don't want to do that. I don't want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter. Maybe it's because I don't even really know what that looks like. As sure as I know anything, I know what it sounds like. It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity. It sounds like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times the scene where he's so enthusiastic about screwing hex nuts in a factory that he screws the buttons on people's shirts, and then he goes and gets himself caught in the conveyor belt, snaking through the gears and screwing in the hex nuts inside the machine. It sounds like people around me are throwing themselves at the machine, volunteering to make themselves obsolete for $500k a year. If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?
It makes me sad that I missed the boat on startups. I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier. I'm good at web stuff, I'm good at Rust, I can even do OS stuff. I watched all the YC Stanford lectures this summer while translating tests from one language to another as an intern. Now there's no such thing as a startup, there are only "AI startups", where you build a company that somebody else can write a prompt for in 30 seconds. And if they can't write a prompt for it now, they'll be able to next year with GPT-7, or whenever AI hardware fabrication gets better.
It makes me sad that AI evangelists are so quick to adopt the language of online incels, and that AI-generated art and music have become the defining aesthetic of fascism in the 2020s while AI-generated writing went from risible to a mark of stupidity to something reluctantly accepted since it sits at the fringes of everything useful on the Internet like a kind of digital mold.
The overwhelming weight of it all feels so stifling. It feels like there's no way to stop it. I can't imagine a Twitter (sorry, an X) where every post isn't filled with verified bots spewing LLM nonsense in the replies. I can't imagine an article about some random topic on some random webpage, designed to maximize SEO for some banner ad I won't see because I block ads, being written by a human. We would have to rebuild all our institutions.
Then there is “The part where I’m not (that) sad anymore,” and I’ll skip some of it.
Recently, I've seen a lot of people point out the fact that billions (trillions?) in AI spend has translated to absolutely no benefit for most consumers of everyday apps. Obviously, people who use ChatGPT get the benefit of having their question answered. But in the world where development is getting faster and cheaper, I can't think of a single piece of software I use that has gotten better. Everything is exactly the same, just with a button to ask a chatbot. Somebody has to notice this eventually.
I want an industry that makes sense. Right now, we have (most of) my undergrad classmates' dream industry. They drink constantly, skip lectures, scrape by on their homework with AI, complain about classes, grind Leetcode to get internships, and eventually get their diploma. It must feel like walking around in a literal dream, where your footsteps have no weight, like Wile E. Coyote near a ledge. They commiserate with their friends, "That class is so hard. I just asked Chat." I know because I hear them two seats away from me. Now they get to work a job where they commiserate to an coding agent, "this task is so hard. Do this for me." How come they get to look forward to relief while I feel dread? And that just makes me feel selfish. They're only human too. They is how they've been told to navigate life. For some reason, somebody forgot to tell me. I want an industry that makes sense.
Selected comments from Hacker News:
One:
AI makes me happy
But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.
Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.
It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.
Two (a moron):
My grandfather was a musician. I appreciate the skill and dedication to the craft he had. Today, I sometimes listen to AI-generated music on YouTube, and to be honest I enjoy it. I also enjoy AI-generated art. That doesn't mean I think the world will be improved by the advancement of this field. I have no strong opinion either way, mainly because I just don't have a clue how it will play out. I don't think a society where everyone is a trades-person is very interesting (no offense to trades people), nor do I think it's a solution.
I don't see the point in sticking one's head in the sand and pretending AI doesn't exist. The one distinguishing feature of humans is our intelligence, and we are so intelligent that we are in the process of creating super intelligent beings that (once robotics has advanced enough) have superior physical traits as well, and would be able to repair/maintain themselves to extend their lives indefinitely. Once we have done that, which seems at least plausible to me, I think we will all have an existential crisis. On earth, we treat other species as though they are at our disposal, and only leave them be if it does not cost us much. I wonder if these beings we create will feel similarly about us.
“ It sounds like people around me are throwing themselves at the machine, volunteering to make themselves obsolete.”
As a programmer, I cannot let myself be sad for that. Because making other people jobs’ obsolete has been our bread and butter since the beginning of the field.
As a human being, I cannot watch myself in the mirror loathing about the consequences of stuff I have happily inflicted to so many others, without feeling cynical and egoistic.
I don’t know the answer regarding what to do, besides investing and hoping for policies that would make people standard of living mostly independent from their job if we all become redundant.
Four:
This dichotomy keeps coming up, but I think there are actually three phases of making, and three phases of pleasure, and people keep overlooking the third phase:
The joy of the process itself. If you're a programmer, it's writing code, running it, fixing bugs, making tests pass. If you're a woodworker, it's the feel of wood sliding under your fingers, a deft hand on a chisel.
The satisfaction of a completed work. For a programmer, that's an app you can run and click around and see the features up and running. For a woodworker, it's a sanded finished piece of furniture sitting there in the workshop.
Seeing the completed work make a difference in someone's life. For a programmer, that's a user telling you how your app helped them achieve a goal. For a woodworker, it's seeing that furniture in a room, watching it accumulate the patina of use.
So much of people talking past each other about AI comes from people who care a lot about 1 and people who never really cared about 1 but care about 2. It turns out there are many programmers who never really liked programming, they just wanted to have made an app. They are delighted about AI because it lets them skip a lot of step 1 and get right to 2.
But what I think is critically missing is that for most people, step 2 is marginal. It's step 3 where most of the real joy is. An app with zero users does not get you up in the morning. A piece of furniture collecting dust in an attic is not a source of meaning.
And the core problem with AI is that it gives you 2 by burning a whole lot of 3. Yes, you can whip up your "exercise tracker for cats" app in a tiny fraction of the time. So can a million other people. Your app is going to drown in a sea of other forgotten apps. Probably none of them will be maintained and none will reach critical mass.
I've done a lot of creative work over the years and time and again, as digital technology has lowered the barrier of entry, I've watched a horde of enthusiastic new people become disillusioned when it turns out they can make things now, but it's harder than ever to actually connect those things to people because everyone else can too.
I remember when DSLRs got a million people excited about being professional photographers, but now almost none are because photos are a mostly worthless commodity. I remember when CD mixers and Serato opened the doors to a million DJs who no longer had to buy expensive vinyl and struggle with beatmatching records. Now DJ mixes are a dime a dozen and it's harder than ever to be a working DJ. Recording an album used to require a room full of very expensive gear. Now anyone with a laptop and a DAW can do it. Publishing a novel required getting one of a small number of publishers to like it enough to print a thousand copies. Now anyone can upload a PDF to Amazon and share it with the world.
What happens when the barrier of entry gets radically lowered is that it requires some other extrinsic attribute to rise above the competition. In practice, that is either being rich and connected already, or getting extremely lucky. Domains where anyone can play have the steepest power law distributions. You have a few stars that everyone wishes they were and a million people doing it in their limited spare time. Unless you're already one of the elites, it's basically a lottery.
Now that's going to happen with software development.
Five:
“I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier.”
I used to think that. I came to the realization that I could have technically built Facebook the product, but would never in a million years have built Facebook the company. But having just finished "Careless People" I feel kinda good about that.
I also just got back from a vacation to Alaska. Lots of gold rush stories from Skagway. One of my favorites was a lady who became massively wealthy by starting baking apple pies for the gold rushers. The classic "sell the shovel" story we hear. And one that also tells me not to lament not being first.
I see people who chased that with crypto or whatever hot trend. None of them struck it rich and feel burned out and have little to show for it. But instead to focus on your values and delivering value. Explorers at the time were suffering scurvy from too much canned and salted food so a pie served not just the soul but the body. She didn't have to be there first even.
I also think that the person I am today might not have even had the skills or gotten into the industry if it were 5 or 10 years earlier. It's the mighty ducks "a half inch and it would have gone in" but a half inch in the other direction could have also completely whiffed it.