I am dealing with it by walking away from the internet and connected technology as much as possible.

Unfortunately, generally if people can do something, they will. And with AI systems they have been given one of the largest short cuts possible, thus they take it relentlessly. There is no concern for quality so long as it is good enough to benefit them.

They will try to rationalize it but it typically ends up in moral corruption of "If I don't, they will."

It saddens me because I saw the vision of what computers and connected technology could be in the 90's and 2000's, only to see it turn bitter.

I remember reading an essay by Richard Stallman calling all this kind of stuff out in the late 1980's and I kind of hate that he got it so right. In assuming that many will take the power play and the convenience means that this is the path we take.

The more you can walk away form this stuff the better even if you don't want to.

The cost of producing code has dropped to almost zero, but the cost of knowing whether that code is actually useful hasn't.

I think the same is true for images, videos, and music. The cost of producing content is approaching zero, but taste, originality, judgment, and intent still matter.

In a world where anyone can create almost anything, having good taste could become increasingly important.

I have worked professionally in programming for about 35 years, and before that, I was part of the demoscene. As I see it, the programming profession has evolved multiple times throughout my career. Things have continuously been abstracted into new layers, but the shift has never been as fundamental as it is today with AI.

What is happening now is that we are essentially abstracting away the entire coding layer, and partly even architecture and technology all at once (we aren't quite there yet, but we will be soon). What hasn't changed, and never will, is the human vision, the ideas of how new, innovative software (rather than just a clone) should be structured and how it should function.

I believe this shift is highly democratizing. It means teenagers can build cool new games, and financial minds can create the next great finance app. The hard part is no longer the programming itself; it is the software craftsmanship. It is about building an innovative and genuinely useful product, rather than just writing complex code (an identity we programmers have clung to for a long time). We have transitioned from being mere coders to true developers.

I also hope that young people today get the same opportunity to connect with software development as we did back in the Commodore 64 era. Only today, it isn't about squeezing every last drop of performance out of limited hardware, it is about bringing something truly useful or fun straight from your imagination into reality.

Every industry goes through a cycle of birth, explosion of creativity, enormous profitability, followed by consolidation and a small corporate class, and a large hobby class.

A time ago, sewing and tailoring was a valuable skill. Cheap clothes made it unnecessary. Today sewing is a hobby and most people who sew do so at a lower quality than a machine. You can say the same about pottery and ceramics.

There was a time when there were hundreds of car companies. Folks who wanted to could build a car, or plane, from scratch. That's not possible anymore.

Today lots of people cook at home at a level far superior to (at least) fast food restaurants. But of course fast food still exists.

I have been lucky to spend my career at the birth of the industry. It is now moving into the next stage, the commoditization of the skill set. I've seen the industry change before though, this is just the next cycle of that.

Lots of people will make a lot of software for themselves. But they won't sell it. Lots of other people will buy software because programming (ai or not) won't interest them. Programming isn't the skill here. Everything else in the business is.

(Tree was full of apples before, easy to grab, and no one even knew it. Later we started to jump, climb and find new ways that was progressive and very exciting. All a sudden they figure out the tree that was already running out of apples, so what. Find a new one that requires tools/skills not much people has and still valuable, it is much harder to say but you are already one of the people who can and should. Your 12 year old of your self used curiosity, passion, what ever the motive is still there, just kick start it again, find your new AOL, do your first new Geocities level project that matches today's tech.That means imo it is time for you to train your first llm, dig into how inference works. Or write your first arduboy game for fun. The new challenging stuff that they can not touch any time soon hopefully that will trigger back your curiosity and passion. Best of luck! My 2 cents.)