Authenticity
As someone who eats food, I need a job to sustain myself. And finding jobs needs a certain degree of pretentiousness. I have always found it *hard to be authentic as my identity is deeply entwined with politics. My reaction to having the market demand a certain sets of interests like AI skills was to quickly become dissatisfied and not being able to upkeep a buzz word filled LinkedIn profile. I decided that I will try not to play to the whims of market all together and try and look for a job that is anti-AI-slop.
Life has humbled me quickly as I talked to some people I respect very well across the tech industry. As someone who likes to be vocally anti-slop, I entered into a dilemma where I don't want to lose prospects of my employment by rambling about AI slop on LinkedIn.
Pretending comes at a cost, a lot of closeted queer people know this really well. It could look like lying a lot about oneself, keeping track of those lies is cognitively demanding. It could also look like not being able to fulfill desires which leads to dissatisfaction.
I am a trans woman and after transitioning for almost 3 years, I find myself asking if I am becoming a closeted AI-hater. Somehow the whole experience feels similar to living with an unaccepting family. You will be working for a daddy corporation who will keep shoving an AI-powered Claude-maxxer programmer on your face. While you try to hide the fact that you are absolutely drowning in mentally exhausting reviews, you are not confident with the code you ship, and maybe, if you're a fairly junior engineer, developing the intuition to review complex architectural decision will take time.
I have considered contributing keeping to contribute to open source projects that don't accept AI PRs like Servo.
As I wrap up my internship, and I enter the job market I feel like I will enter months of cognitive and skill decline. Using LLMs to write code feels a lot like being in a Skinner's box experiment
Instead of understanding everything thoroughly and understanding the nuances, I just press a button to generate code that might fit the requirements. Code was always perfected over time, existing implementations understood, slowly modified into something better. It wasn't always perfect. But humans writing code is like if LLMs had an infinite context window and did not get worse by the context window filling up. And somehow CXOs and tech bros have decided to ignore the wisdom of years.
It's truly a time in the engineering world where it sucks to care about code and wanting mastery over what a developer is shipping while also making money.
A lot of people I talked to told me that they did not feel motivated enough about writing code by hand anymore. We naturally avoid pain, and if there is an easier option available we will take it.
And this is the reason I decided to create a new website where I don't feel pressured by different web and design trends, I want to implement the design that feels close to me rahter than a market-driven arbitrary standard. I want to share ideas that I have, instead of optimizing for what if my future employer thinks I am a bad hire because I ramble about AI.
*You might know me as a "proud and open" transgender woman, but at the same time when I meet strangers I try to pretend that I am cis-gendered.