I wrote a little bit about this a few weeks ago [1]. For me, programming, building software has always been a creative expression based on fundamentals. AI sucks all the joy out of it.

[1] https://deanclatworthy.com/2026/02/09/the-joy-of-programming...

Everyone in tech isn’t sad, the people who are vocal about being sad are sad.

This is a universal concept across the Internet.

If you’re on your phone all day doom scrolling you’ll only encounter sad people.

This is a common source of confusion. The knitting / pottery making is not rewarding because its made by hands or is not knowledge work, but because it is done in the direct service of someone. Modern organizations are complex and can put several layers between the knowledge worker and the customer it ultimately serves. This produces the feeling of 'cog in a machine'. It is possible to work such jobs and serve others directly on the side (e.g. friday evening soup kitchen)

Most of the people in tech I know that have interpersonal relationships and go out and look at a tree every once in a while are not often sad.

I am not excited about tech anymore. I dread it to be honest. I was an early engineer at a AI company that got acquired. From that and related stock (golden handcuffs) was able to retire a couple of years ago. There were some tech problems that I wanted to investigate and I took a bunch of classes. Fun.

I loved my career.

Wow have my feelings changed. I'm disgusted. It's a moral disgust. The scene turns me off SO MUCH. Just a recent tidbit: I think it is Anthropic that is buying old (some antique, vintage) books, scanning them, then pulping them.

There is no restraint at this point. Whether it's Meta and their pervert glasses and child exploitation. Or google trashing their own search.

One thing that has turned my stomach is how management has acted after discovering they could trash their skilled workers in the way that so many other industries have been able to do. If you want to know management's true character, remove the moat (that skill used to be) from the workers and watch what happens.

...Okay, I'm editing. There is a bright spot. The other day I was sitting around doing nothing and suddenly out of the blue dreamed up an app that could help build community regarding an activity I care a lot about. With an LLM I could do the whole thing myself. I'm excited about this. I might fit this in among my other projects. It's kind of like taking a hammer and chisel and cutting a piece off of Big Tech. If all of us skilled folks do this we could have an impact and serve community at the same time.

> knowledge work is mostly pointless

Really, noemamag?

>A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.

The pleasure...

I dont think it will happen

I like an article focused on us, the special tech people.

But the truth is everyone is sad or subjectively unhappy no matter if that is a real or imaginary reflection of wealth or money or access to food, cloths, coffee, restaurants ...

You can see it in SF movies: a lot of the successful ones in the last years maybe 10, maybe 20 years are not optimistic about the future. The same is in all areas of life: we seem to need always something to reach for, or something to fix, to work on, to improve so we can be (maybe have) eudaimonia (for a lack of a better word) or just a normal life.

we spent a decade being told we were building the future, and now the future is a subscription fee and a quarterly layoff email