Why I Choose Anxiety Over Anger in the Age of AI

I was taught that anger isn't an emotion. It's a reaction -a defensive surge of adrenaline, binary thinking, and motivation to fight. It can feel empowering and energizing. We aren't just sitting here. We're gonna do something.

The emotion is fear. Anger is just a reaction to fear. Basically, if we are angry, we are also scared; whether or not we want to admit it.

It's a long topic, and one I know well (I agree with the above summary), but I really don't think that discussing it, would be particularly welcome, here. I know that it isn't often welcome, even with folks that ask to hear it.

I've spent the majority of my adult life, learning to curb and sideline anger. In my experience, my anger has always caused problems. It has never solved a problem.

Ever. Not even one single problem.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

It's just drained my energy, stunted my reasoning, and poisoned relationships. It has caused others to strike back at me, when they didn't need to (which, of course, caused me damage), it has caused problems, where none existed before, and magnified existing ones.

We can't help getting angry, but we sure can help staying angry. That "staying" part is the corrosive agent. Anger is meant to be a temporary burst of energy, to deal with a threat. After the threat has (or has not) been dealt with, anger is supposed to dissipate. It's not supposed to be an "at rest" state (unless you're Bruce

Banner).

I think right now I love my job. I can work 5 times faster and explore all the little things that I never had time for. All my side projects suddenly come to fruition!

But I have never been more anxious. I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind. It didn’t use to be like this.

I’m not the arbiter of emotions but being angry is valid and it doesn’t have to be directed. It’s not necessarily a vector. If I worked very hard to transplant a tree, and at no fault of anyone, it dies in the process, I can be angry I invested my time, money and energy into the failed effort. No one has the right to say that’s the wrong emotion to feel.

> I’m afraid we’re completely ignoring the impact this has on society at large, the climate, and the balance of the world as a whole.

Who's we? The impact this has on society at large is such an enormous, pervasive topic in my life - headlines in city newspapers, conversation at the dinner table - that I feel like you'd have to be living in a bunker to think nobody is engaging with it. This guy comes across as entirely disconnected from the world, but somehow thinks he knows how people who actually live in it should feel.

As far as I can tell, we've convinced companies and VCs to dump billions of dollars into infrastructure to support a vision where they can get more done with fewer people. They've been duped.

I think of LLMs as a labor-liberating tool. It's saving me effort so I don't have to drudge through enterprise codebases and memorize company-specific knowledge that is a dead end for my career. Instead I can run an agent while doing chores.

The beauty of the entire LLM stack is that it requires us. It is useless without a human-in-the-loop. The entire stack is designed around human intervention. We will not magically invent a way to remove the human without first removing it from training.

So rest assured, so long as there are humans in the training loop, there's nothing to worry about, because LLMs are a cybernetic enhancement, not a replacement.

Neither this post nor the Sean Goedecke one gives an example of what being angry at work looks like. Anger is a pretty broad emotion. Without examples to base the discussion, it all seems kind of meaningless to me. I see a lot of frustration at work. At what point does it become anger?

It's interesting to see the range of reactions to this article, and it feels this is an existential moment for software engineers and an article like this has zero chance of changing anyone's mind.

Personally I'm glad this change is happening after I've already had a couple decades experience. Conventional wisdom is younger people adapt to change better, but in this case I feel some perspective on hype cycles and how they play out is helpful. So far the only thing that is clear is that AI can read and write code way faster than a human. However what I haven't seen is that AI can actually understand human goals, read between the lines, and answer the question: why are we writing this code in the first place?

Obviously with the pace of advancement, it's reasonable to think AI could get there, but here's the thing: so far AI has primarily empowered technically-minded people. Don't get me wrong, it can help many job functions (legal, product management, customer service, etc), but it's really a force multiplier for strong technical minds who can reason about the possibilities and limitations.

For this reason, I think it's premature to think of the end of software engineering as a profession. As with all the other job replacement talk, I think this becomes a political issue where if AI companies are truly capturing a significant share of the labor workforce, then we need to have that discussion as a society. Also, if you really love hand-crafted artisanal code for every rand […]