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The story
A thread titled “I’m an IT programmer, but AI has killed my motivation” appeared on 5ch’s Newsspeed VIP board. The poster confessed that although they used to love studying technology, AI now does the work for them, and they’ve lost the will to learn. This drew pushback like “If you really loved it, you’d study AI instead,” along with anxious comments about AI’s growing influence over jobs and pricing. The thread split over whether engineers who master AI or those who can code without it will be more in demand going forward, and whether clients choose contractors on price alone.
What people said
but since AI just builds it for me now,
I've lost the motivation to study.
You're just looking for an excuse not to.
Even AI books these days
only cover how to use AI.
Boring.
Right there with you — for some reason it always writes way too much.
Or what if they ban you over some crazy political reason?
Once you're cut off, you'll have to code everything yourself again.
Keep studying as a hedge against that risk, okay?
Any decent company spreads its AI usage across multiple providers (eight or more isn't unusual) and can fine-tune open-source AI in-house.
Worrying about that is about as cost-effective as practicing survival skills for when civilization collapses.
There are programmers who love turning ideas into reality,
and programmers who love the puzzle of building it piece by piece.
It's the latter group AI is demoralizing.
No, beyond that, fewer people are needed overall — especially rookies who can't judge whether AI's output is good or bad, they're the least wanted of all.
Getting hired as a newcomer is only getting harder compared to a decade ago.
No way that's true.
If anything, the least-wanted people are the ones going around saying 'I'll just use AI for it.'
People who can code without AI are obviously going to be the ones who get hired.
From a client's perspective, whether it was made with AI doesn't matter.
When there's plenty of competition, the faster and cheaper option normally wins.
Companies that don't get on the AI wave have no future.
don't care whether it's built with AI or by hand — the method doesn't matter to them.
The responsibility falls on whoever builds it anyway,
so don't they just look at the price?
'Don't they just look at the price?' — how can you say that so confidently when you don't actually know?
Take that up with Re: #43.
what they're even going to school for these days.
Art still has value in individuality,
so it's probably still more worth pursuing than a job like programming where artistry isn't needed at all.
To put it simply:
people do say 'I love your artwork,'
but nobody ever says 'I love your code.'
Though jobs keep shrinking in both fields.
So what do clients actually look at, then?
Don't expect me to answer every single question for you.
Start by going and interviewing at an IT company yourself.
So you can't answer, huh.
Okay, okay, got it.
Well,
I've been thinking about building stuff on my own,
but my Mac's old and some of the keycaps are peeling off,
so I can't get motivated until I buy a new PC.
Up until now that's what I got paid for.
Going forward, that's exactly the part I won't get paid for anymore.
An image I made with Google's AI
Background and Points of Debate
The backdrop here is that generative-AI-driven “vibe coding” has begun making its way into real-world work, allowing a decent amount of code to be written just by describing requirements. The thread split over how to evaluate this shift: a pessimistic view that work will dry up for humans if AI can be left to handle it, versus an optimistic view that people who can judge whether AI’s output is good or bad will be needed more than ever. Opinions also diverged on what clients use to choose who they hire — price alone, or quality and track record as well. That said, no objective figures were presented in the thread regarding whether AI-savvy engineers or those who don’t rely on AI have the edge in the job market — it’s worth noting this discussion is based purely on each participant’s personal impressions.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Newsspeed VIP) thread “I’m an IT programmer, but AI has killed my motivation.”
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