Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'
Excerpt from the article above. It heavily leans on Reddit quotes, articles posted on Reddit and the number of upvotes to backup or sustain certain arguments. But I found the article informative, and publishing a message and a feeling I've been struggling to describe, write or externalise. Hope it's helpful or at least interesting to us here.
Apparently my feelings of disillusionment, confusion, anxiety, failing self esteem and occasionally anger or frustration from AI has a name that's starting to be written and formalised. Though not yet accepted either informally or formally, but it's starting a conversation which I'm thankful for, _Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction_. From the article:
"In September 2025, two psychiatrists at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Stephanie McNamara and Joseph E. Thornton, published a paper in the journal Cureus proposing a new construct they call Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction, or AIRD."
I'll be sharing this article with my psychologist when we meet in a few weeks.
The article author, according to their site's About page, is a "a performance marketing and paid social media director". While that doesn't necessarily invalidate their opinion, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in it either, particularly whether it accurately describes what's happening in the software industry.
> Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'
I think the idea that coal miners or factory laborers or whoever else in blue-collar work did not identify with their work is just wrong, and there's evidence going back as far as the Tomb of Eurysaces the Baker of people deeply identifying with work we might otherwise be tempted to view as lowly.
Absolutely true - witness the enormous upheaval in the north of England’s coal mining communities when all the pits got closed in the 1980s. It wasn’t just individuals but families across generations and entire villages who had defined themselves by the work they did. It was easy for those in Westminster to say it was a sound decision for the national economy as a whole, but apart from leaving the workers high and dry with no other visible opportunities they absolutely failed to reckon with the cultural impact of taking away the very source of people’s sense of identity.
I like the term AI induced loss of meaning. It covers loss of meaning in work. Loss of meaning in skills. Loss of meaning in art. Loss of meaning in interpersonal communication when you get AI responses back.
Yes, and this is something that is routinely overlooked. Work identities run deep, and they are not easily changed.
Andrew Yang actually made a strong point when he was talking about automation-driven job losses way back in 2019. He said you can offer the best and most expensive retraining programs imaginable to help people displaced from their jobs move to fields like healthcare - but most truck drivers, even if out of work, will never even consider retaining to work as a nurse. Identities are not as malleable to the whims of supply and demand as some might want to believe.
Truck driver to nurse is special kind of issue, because nursing is feminine coded occupation and trucking attracts men who want to prove own masculinity. But they will take jobs that are not that much feminine.
And nursing also require a lot more study then people assume, 40 years old trucker will have hard time spending that much time in school even if it was his lifelong dream.
Without throwing the gender stuff into it... There are plenty of occupations I have no interest in and can't picture myself ever doing. People spend their childhood and young adulthood figuring out what they are good at and what they enjoy, and you can't expect them to suddenly move to something completely different.
I'm not going to hold back my description of reality out of fear that it's somehow magically shaping it. Stating most nurses are female is the mildest observation possible, and doesn't sneak in any opinion whether that's good or bad, unlike your comment.
The profession is in reality overwhelmingly female, and it is associated with women in basically the entire world. Even from a linguistic perspective, the origins of the English word is gendered (the association with wet nurses is unmistakably feminine), and similar phenomenon happen in other languages. It's no longer considered the polite word to use, but if you read moderately old Japanese texts you'll find nurses referred to as "kangohu," no longer preferred because the "hu" part specifically means "woman." I'm sure if we did a survey of more world languages we'd find other hints. Even high-minded economic writing will describe it as "pink-collar" work. You could quite sensibly argue that it should be otherwise but the world is not as we might wish it were.
OP did not say anything about skilled workers who make things with their hands. You are describing an artisan or craftsman, or at the very least a tradesman.
The quote is talking about manufacturing labor. This is the guy on the assembly line who lowers the press, makes his thousandth widget for a day, and then lifts it up. Rinse and repeat.
That person would have been a skilled laborer like a blacksmith a few generations ago. I'm sure many of those people felt the same way when factories started to produce what they had spent a lifetime learning to make.
Now that is happening to many kinds of knowledge workers. Assembly lines mechanized the work of artisans. LLMs are in the process of mechanizing knowledge and creative work, of certain kinds.
I’m not sure people working on an assembly line in a factory is defining themselves as their work task. Someone working in a factory mounting IPhone screens probably don’t make their job their identity the same way a designer, developer, author does.
(Of course there are manual jobs that people have as their identity.)
One tiny nanoscopic nitpick, because i agree with you mostly, programming is often creating wider things (abstractions, frameworks). I think it hits a different part compared to most jobs. Maybe... i'm not sure, but that's how i feel compared to other manual occupations that i loved too.
It's also reflective of the author living in a very small bubble. It's quite a shame that chose to include that as I think the article is otherwise relevant and pertinent, but it colors the whole thing.
The article says nothing about “skilled people who work with their hands” specifically, so it’s unclear what is being refuted here.
However there are people in the workforce who don’t identify with their work. Those are likely not in professions that Marx thought of when he wrote about alienation, but instead are Uber Eats delivery drivers, call centre workers, flight attendants on low-cost airlines, nurses in mediocre hospitals, and so on.
Or just maybe it’s heavily economic. Yea there are many people with lots of money who are anxious about being rendered unneeded, but can we talk for a minute about all the people trying really hard to save who are needing to rent at market rates, or maybe they have a mortgage and desperately need their current income in order to not lose their home? Let alone that the people more likely to be replaced are those paid the least!
Similar to LLM smells in writing, anyone that blogs about Reddit comments to make broad extrapolations about society or psychology or anything really…I just write it off as slop.
They’re low effort takes from terminally online weirdos. The number of upvotes something gets is meaningless. Using it as some kind of appeal to authority or credibility on a topic is a joke.
Like those SEO slop gaming articles about “controversies” because some anonymous account on Reddit complained that a character got race swapped or something.
This crap gets pulled into Google search results and gets repeated as truth by Gemini when it does a web search.
Coding agents don’t threaten engineering expertise as much as they threaten the problem-to-solution-to-shipping loop engineers built their identity around.
I take issue with calling it a dysfunction when the symptoms are a completely natural and appropriate response to an irritation. To me, it has a whiff of blaming the victim.
I’ve been critiquing what I’ve called AI Inevitability Soothsaying[1] and this seems related:
> > Not all articles in this AI category are outright positive. They range from the euphoric to the slightly depressed. But they share the same premise of inevitability; even the most negative will say that, of course I use AI, I’m not some Luddite[3]! It is integral to my work now. But I don’t just let it run the whole game. I copy–paste with judicious care. blah blah blah
This looks very similar.
Because what is happening? People are getting laid off. Because of AI. They say. There are many doubters here on this board at least. But what is the first premise of Inevitability? In my book it is to take AI as a given, as the unstoppable force; don’t necessarily praise AI, in fact you can write as if it is hitting us like a merciless meteor. But you have to use that as the premise.
Next find a topic to write about. (It’s really about AI but you need a topic that is about the “externalities”.) Well here you have Reddit Comments. Which you seem to imply to have similar thoughts about as me; Reddit posts can be astroturfed to all hell for all you know. Certainly now that they can hide their comment history.
So, Depression. How human. How thoughtful. What a soft subject. What a Trojan Horse? That someone cares about this Definitely a Thing? Like here[2]:
> > If you're an engineer who uses AI daily - for design reviews, code generation, debugging, documentation, architecture decisions - and you've noticed that you're somehow more tired than before AI existed, this post is for you. You're not imagining it. You're not weak. You're experiencing something real that the industry is aggressively pretending doesn't exist. And if someone who builds agent infrastructure full-time can burn out on AI, it can happen to anyone.
It is very real and we feel your emotions. Right. The meteor has struck us all.
So what’s the point of Inevitabilism? (This is all speculation anyway.) Fear is certainly a factor. Because only investors need to feel good about AI. Workers need discipline more than positivism.[3]
But does that mean this is false? Of course not. But how much of this Shared Depression is because of Interesting Pieces like this one? Just think. You can ruminate yourself into a state of depression (at least lower-d) without anyone giving you even one bad “performance review”.
> > Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'
No, it’s a fucking paycheck my guy.
To the extent that it’s an identity though. Uh what? Never met a pre-computer, non-office worker male put into disability or retirement? A homemaker with no one to care for?
Really you went to Reddit and concluded that only office workers have an identity? Eat shit, TFA.
It's exactly the same. "The secret ingredient is crime...", then once the coffers are full use the cash to legitimate their presence into a legal offering.
It's not as much of a hoodwink as you would think however, it's everywhere and has been the same throughout history.
East India Company, Facebook, and even more recently Uber. Uber is the most readily documented.
In Australia (and I'm almost certain else where, but I'll talk about Brisbane, Queensland explicitly), Uber were illegal for years and just paid the fines to the local authorities when pegged. And continued to do so until they became legal.
It's a confronting and candid example of "money fixes all problems". The truth of this continues to bother me, the older and maybe not wiser I become, the more twisted I am from feeling disenfranchised, jaded and cynical from this truth.
The world fundamentally operates very differently at the macro level where money is counted in 10 or more digits than the micro level where most of us here sit. Witnessing the average person struggle to home and feed them selves on a countries median wage. While organisations wash their sins with coffers and pivot into unicorns and technical behemoths.
Nothing more disappointing than seeing a super cool project and reading the super long github readme, only to see right at the bottom "I vibe coded this application"
IMO, it goes against 'self-hosted' too. Self-hosting for your own data, control of it, and handling of it. Self-hosting to learn new things and scratch your own itch for a niche product. AI vibe coding doesn't have any of that. Literally an _idea_ that someone else implements and you the 'coder' don't really have any control or understanding of.
Why would I want to take ownership of that for my own security?
it’s respectful of everyone’s time if the “vibe coded disclaimer” is at the TOP of the readme, not the bottom. Why bury that in the fine print?
It’s also a very good indicator of how invested the author is in the repo. Is this a throwaway weekend project? Is it their “baby” so to speak? Should i even bother asking the author a question if i run into an issue, after all, they didn’t write any of the code so…
While I do have some experience with vibe coding, this could've been done by my wife who has little tech knowledge. That's the scary part.
My flow was to open 3 terminals, ask AI to work on some feature in each, check how it looks in the frontend and if it didn't look/work quite right, I asked it again. Once I deemed the feature OK, I just cleared the context and went on to a new task. The 3 terminals ate through claude $20 within 10-15 minutes.
I wonder if this breaks at some point when the codebase is more complex/large, or does not. If it doesn't, then the future is scary, because everyone can recreate many of the SAAS products within hours. What's the moat for Todoist for example? Without AI, it would've taken quite some effort, know-how and time to get something similar up and running. I reckon that with the $100 plan, I could have made it almost identical to it. Perhaps I could even create mobile app builds as well (react native perhaps).
What stops me from then offering this for 1/5 the cost of the real app?
And that's established apps. Imagine how easy/trivial it is to clone something that's new, and that was possibly vibe coded itself. E.g. someone posts to HN "Show HN: I made xyz". It looks great, it works great, it has a great idea. Then we take LLM's and recreate it within 4 hours. Poof! There's no reason to pay for it instantly.
That's what I find depressing, though - having a great idea and using LLM to create a great product, will not be enough. People will be able to clone everything. At least that's what my little experience with claude tells me. And now let's just wait 1 more year and see how good claude code 2.0 and co will be. I reckon sooner than later, 0 tech-knowledge will be needed to get apps up and running.
That's why it's time to pivot to some other role in the near future ;)
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
I switched from Windows to Linux a couple of weeks ago and to KeePass XC. I like it that I can easily copy/paste passwords on sites where autofill is not allowed, e.g. banking. It's free, open source, no tracking and local and you can donate directly to the org. Of late I grow somewhat allergic to commercial solutions.
Yeah, technically your phone isn't even involved. The watch manages all the cryptographic keys independently and you can add cards through the Google Wallet app or website.
It's not that bad, my battery lasts around 36 hours. I take it off when I go to shower and by the time I remember to put it back on (~30min) it's usually back to 90%+.
It seems to me that the writer, Herman, doesn't want to use the cloud short of the parts that are almost mandatory these days (e.g., CloudFlare, or a CDN of some sort).
GitHub Pages, CloudFlare pages etc are a great and very simple service. But they're opposite or contrary to running your own hardware, warts and all.
Herman wasn't looking for solutions IMO, I read it more as him lamenting at how hostile and insidious the internet has become. It has been for some time, but it seems to be getting exponentially worse.
Remember when Stormfront was a thing? Remember how everyone cheered on that CF and others banned them? I’m sure Herman was one of the loudest ones to proclaim victory that day.
Hostility and insidiousness were created by you for not standing up when it was most needed and called for. And as you can see, Stormfront in hindsight was the most milquetoast website compared to landscape of politics today. All I’m saying is CF is a viable caching option. But if you’re looking for morality support - you lost that war a long time ago.
“If we do not stand up for the rights of the accused, we endanger our own. For when the tide turns, who will stand up for us?”
'Work as Identity: The Foundation'
Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'
Excerpt from the article above. It heavily leans on Reddit quotes, articles posted on Reddit and the number of upvotes to backup or sustain certain arguments. But I found the article informative, and publishing a message and a feeling I've been struggling to describe, write or externalise. Hope it's helpful or at least interesting to us here.
Apparently my feelings of disillusionment, confusion, anxiety, failing self esteem and occasionally anger or frustration from AI has a name that's starting to be written and formalised. Though not yet accepted either informally or formally, but it's starting a conversation which I'm thankful for, _Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction_. From the article:
"In September 2025, two psychiatrists at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Stephanie McNamara and Joseph E. Thornton, published a paper in the journal Cureus proposing a new construct they call Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction, or AIRD."
I'll be sharing this article with my psychologist when we meet in a few weeks.