Ask HN: I lost any interest in technology. What do I do?
Dear HN,
For the past months, maybe a year, I have lost any interest in technology, software and hardware. When I was a teenager, I had very big passion to software engineering, and have seen technology as something good, a way to improve peoples lives.
With the arrival of AI, everything changed. Don't get me wrong, I like that I can tell Claude what to do, while I can do something else, but I can't keep closing my eyes onto the fact that I'm basically pushing myself out of the job market. Sure, you could argue that I should write code by hand, but this is a competitive disadvantage on a market that lost its mind.
On top of all that, almost every new technological progress is a wolf in sheep clothes. If you remove the fluff and the marketing, it seems like all these new startups are just yet another get-rich-quick-schemes where they raise as much money as possible, while promising one thing to the users, but delivering another. And when they eventually cash-out, everyone is left worse off.
I'm approaching 40. Maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic. But I don't know how to move forward, how do I keep working and motivating myself. I lost any interest in work, or any care I had for the product (why should I care? It's not mine anymore when Claude writes everything). I lost any hope in technology in the terms that it will bring us to a better future. And I honestly, don't know what to do anymore.
Comments
Hey Man,
One fact that people forget is technology, programming became famous because people loved to do it. Apart from solving problem, if people are not interested to solve them via programming, then none of the capital nor modern solutions wouldn't have existed.
What is very important now is, as human race, we need to take a break, retrospect ourselves. 10+ years of programming would have made wired your brain for expertise which none of newbies would never achieve in their life time. That is your biggest strength.
We are in golden age of software engineering where we can stop thinking about software engineering itself but focus on solutioning, business and customer values.
If claude writes code, then why can't we talk to customers and give better solutions which claude can never provide at free will.
As programmers we would have at least smiled once in our journey looking into a customer feedback or testimonial, our code solved it.
Maybe start thinking about how we can be useful to other human beings via technology expertise we possess.
Brus, a good fraction, possibly the majority, of SWEs like it precisely for its obsessive focus on minute distinctions. Talking to customers is often a punishment. We don't want to be useful so much as right.
"Talking to customers is a punishment". yes golden words. lot of software engineering rules, craft is being rewritten today.
I don't believe software crafting engineers will be replaced by AI but software boilerplate engineers will be replaced.
At the end of the day, everything we do converges to the word "Customer". So it high time we sneak peek into so called "Customer Voice" and rewrite what software+product craft engineering will look like in future.
Technology is not life. It might make your life easier or it might connect you to people or experiences that would be hard to achieve without it. But technology is not the end goal. You past interest have brought you here. That doesn't mean it was "wrong" or that you can't find the passion again. But it seems like you need a break and maybe a new passion for a while
Same. I was so fascinated by lower-level stuff (chips, assembly, etc.), but when I finally started to dig into it, AI came around and did what would take me forever to do myself in seconds. I thought pivoting from software dev to pentesting would be spark my motivation, but again, AI can do it quicker. I don't find this stuff rewarding anymore.
This made me think about the kinds of things I do find rewarding. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, etc. are billion dollar companies. But what exactly are they? You cannot touch them. You can't smell them. They're not real in the sense that other things are, such as a painting or a statue. If the global power grid were to go down, the value of these companies would drop to 0. Of course, this is unlikely, but I think the point holds.
Nowadays, I want to build physical things; I do wish I went into a different engineering field.
Hey man, you are not "pushing yourself out of a job market". You can give AI to different people and get different quality work. Think of AI as a good tool not as a replacement. You are right, a ton of startups and even grown up companies are driving/drinking hype and their stuff is just wrappers of crap under a nice wrapper that falls of the moment you use their stuff.
Honestly, the work is still yours, that's the beauty of it. Your understanding of what AI did with you, the shape it takes, the direction and the alterations you made along the way. That's what make is special stil.
I was where you are and managed to get out, reply back if you want to chat more.
Boris Cherny, the creator and Head of Claude Code at Anthropic who built Claude Code, has stated in recent interviews that he no longer codes. This is a massive step forward and a promotion of sorts for those who can code, who understand the intricacies and are best positioned to direct and manage LLMs and AI agents. Step into it. We're continually developing personally, it's ongoing and inevitable. This is developing professionally with a whole new playing field of possibilities. Start playing around and your passion will lead to a great, new fit for you.
Have you considered getting laid? Don't knock it til you try it.
I think our interests change as we age. My kids take up so much time I find myself spending less and less time paying attention to "tech."
Well what else are you interested in? There is a lot more to life than technology, maybe take a break and learn a new skill or get exposed to something new.
That's the problem - nothing. I was loving the profession so much that I did it during working hours, and then working on my stuff in the evenings and weekends.
Ah, my other response might be off with this new information. You've not diversified your portfolio and are suffering from a shock to your primary investment.
You might consider adding some new things to do with your time so that the coding is not such a total aspect of your life.
I suffered chronic depression for decades, and the thing that no one ever told me is that there is no One Thing.
The exercise didn't fix it. The therapy didn't fix it. The meditation didn't fix it. The hobbies didn't fix it. It was Everything. When I'm not happy with my art, I do more exercise. When I'm not happy with my exercise, I do more meditation, etc. More social interactions, stronger networks, deeper support group. Eating better. Less social media. Less infotainment. More water. Everything. All the things.
A multitude of small changes has accumulated to a state in which I am now bothered by very little and can easily shrug off a wide variety of things that would previously have shut me down for hours or days.
I recommend that you just start trying out hobbies. Pick something. Anything (although at least initially, make it something that has a community that's local to you.) Commit to it for a set period of time (for me, one or two months works) and force yourself to get into it.
After getting to know the thing beyond first impressions, you'll learn whether or not it actually turns your gears. If it doesn't, drop it and pick something else. Eventually, you will luck into something that excites you -- and it very well may be something that you never would have thought would excite you.
I've found that coding types often enjoy creation type hobbies. Think arts and crafts. Wood working, welding, sculpture, machining, 3d printing.
It's got the same kind of "how do I make what is currently nothing much in to something useful and or beautiful" problem solving, so it tickles the same kind of neurons, I suppose.
I'll add Music. And its never too late to learn. I'm in my 50s and learning piano for the first time.
one thing that helped is taking a little break and find a new passion. i made some 3d prints and with raspberry pis built some fun stuff and played around and came back more energised. Having fun or building stuff and not going completely out of the loop will re ignite it for you
I'm with you, tech should be a means to an end, not an end in itself. I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about using tech for good, to do things we couldn't do without it but without being sticky, or gamified, or enshitified.
That's why I built https://kilta.io/. The wolves have spent the last ~25 years splitting people up, convincing them to optimise themselves as personal products, and in so doing undermining real world communities. Kilta has absolutely zero revenue model, its built to be unmontizeable.
But its really hard to build alternatives to the status quo, as you need to break through all the noise, through the slick marketing campaigns, through the millions in venture funding trying to convince you to create "content" for them to make money from. And anything that is trying to heal the hole these products have created actually needs people to use it to give it value.
we are at pivotal point, we need to adapt and move forward.
Begin with defining and understanding your genuine desire, or what you'd like to desire.
If the desire is the tinkering of old, find yourself something with bad documentation and figure it out, or dive in to something outside your typical realm: infosec, encryption, video encoding/decoding, etc. If the joy is the tinkering, do the tinkering yourself.
If the desire is "be employed in tech", then explore the realm of "agentic engineering". Spec-driven development, prompt engineering, context management, etc. There are still open questions and questions that are currently "solved" with less than optimal solutions. Alternatively, there are many projects that are refusing AI contribution, so any of those companies are places where you'd be on a level field with your coworkers, though I suspect many of them will still use LLMs for research, prototyping, and rubber-ducking.
There's a large gulf between "build me a web browser" and the amount of work that would go in to prompting to get something that competes in compatibility and performance with the current leaders.
But, there's two ways to use the tools at hand. Using it to do your work for you is leading to disillusionment. You might find that using it only for research (as opposed to manually digging through 8 year old reddit posts and poorly written man pages) is a better fit for you.
I was just thinking about the historical precedent for this pattern. Imagine you're a farmer when internal combustion engines are first becoming popular. Your neighbor has one and he planted twice the acreage you have in the same amount of time. If your love is the farming itself, you've an opportunity to acquire and learn the use of a tractor. If your love is the horses, you'll need to weigh that love against the financial incentive of the tractor. You might figure out that you can keep a horse or two just in case the tractor's down, or just for your love of horses. However, refusing the tractor outright will likely lead to your farmer acquiring your land in some future.
Art is another example. I know my way around a digital editor. I've seen some impressive generated results. I don't make any money from my art, so the decision is perhaps easier. I derive joy and calm from the manual process of dragging graphite across paper, and massive joy from the smiles my gifts produce. I'd argue that any such gift created by a prompt would never generate such a smile, and I'd get none of the meditative calm from the creation process.
This is the same. There's a new tool that's all the craze. You can either go all in, stick to your guns, or keep your favorites around for fun. You just have to decide what's right for you, and nevermind about the neighbors, because if it's not for you no amount of their enjoyment will transfer to you.
go fishing