I was taught that anger isn't an emotion. It's a reaction -a defensive surge of adrenaline, binary thinking, and motivation to fight. It can feel empowering and energizing. We aren't just sitting here. We're gonna do something.
The emotion is fear. Anger is just a reaction to fear. Basically, if we are angry, we are also scared; whether or not we want to admit it.
It's a long topic, and one I know well (I agree with the above summary), but I really don't think that discussing it, would be particularly welcome, here. I know that it isn't often welcome, even with folks that ask to hear it.
I've spent the majority of my adult life, learning to curb and sideline anger. In my experience, my anger has always caused problems. It has never solved a problem.
Ever. Not even one single problem.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
It's just drained my energy, stunted my reasoning, and poisoned relationships. It has caused others to strike back at me, when they didn't need to (which, of course, caused me damage), it has caused problems, where none existed before, and magnified existing ones.
We can't help getting angry, but we sure can help staying angry. That "staying" part is the corrosive agent. Anger is meant to be a temporary burst of energy, to deal with a threat. After the threat has (or has not) been dealt with, anger is supposed to dissipate. It's not supposed to be an "at rest" state (unless you're Bruce
Banner).
The record scratch for me here was the idea that people can choose to be unsure instead of angry.
People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature.
(There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from understanding this; for instance, skilled consultants put a price tag on certainty; you can sell determinism by itself, separate from any product or service you're more overtly offering.)
Perhaps it doesn't come naturally for others and is therefore a bit of a struggle to shift into, but I love being unsure. It's great. It's a thing that's totally okay to be. The reality of life is that we're all unsure about a great deal, and it's quite a nice feeling to acknowledge uncertainty, sit within it and feel okay.
People typically do not approach existential uncertainties with such intrepidness. I think this is the case for most people who hate AI. This article glosses over that.
I suppose I am one of the people who could technically be lumped into the "hate AI" category, and yet I find myself incredibly comfortable with the uncertainty around where things are going. Perhaps it's because, as I previously mentioned, I have always enjoyed the feeling of uncertainty (and I recognize that's not the norm for most), but it's also because the entire thing feels so hyperbolic from all angles that I can't help but assume that whatever happens will be somewhere "in the middle" of everything everyone's spouting.
As far as I can tell, we've convinced companies and VCs to dump billions of dollars into infrastructure to support a vision where they can get more done with fewer people. They've been duped.
I think of LLMs as a labor-liberating tool. It's saving me effort so I don't have to drudge through enterprise codebases and memorize company-specific knowledge that is a dead end for my career. Instead I can run an agent while doing chores.
The beauty of the entire LLM stack is that it requires us. It is useless without a human-in-the-loop. The entire stack is designed around human intervention. We will not magically invent a way to remove the human without first removing it from training.
So rest assured, so long as there are humans in the training loop, there's nothing to worry about, because LLMs are a cybernetic enhancement, not a replacement.
I think right now I love my job. I can work 5 times faster and explore all the little things that I never had time for. All my side projects suddenly come to fruition!
But I have never been more anxious. I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind. It didn’t use to be like this.
> I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind
I felt this way very recently about the one projects I am focusing on. I kept seeing others explore the same space already ahead of me. I thought I'll never make it here because why use my thing when you can already use those things?
There was this extreme sense of urgency, as if I needed to do nothing else in my life but finish this project and get it out there. One day it hit me, and then over the course of a few weeks it settled in, that I was thinking of this from a place of extrinsic motivation. Basically, I was not doing what I wanted, I was doing what I thought others would want from me.
The project now has only two goals.
1. Build the project I want to use for myself, but in a way that will benefit others who happen to want the same thing.
2. The outcome of the project is not the code/app, it's a "changed Me", having learned everything I needed to to build the project.
Eventually I want the project to have a hosted paid platform version. I am not making this platform because I want to make money (I do, but that's besides the point). I am making this platform because I want experience in doing the types of things that can make money.
The whole thing now has become internally oriented in a way that allows me to no longer feel time pressure or be outcome oriented.
I went from feeling burned out spending all my time on this (I shed all other hobbies and activities), to having a great time spending all my time on this. The same amount of time/effort now feels indefinitely sustainable.
Framing is really one of the most powerful methods of emotional regulation. Whatever you are doing, make it relaxed and fun!
Good article! I agree that curiosity is a wonderful place to land.
However, I think putting anger and curiosity on two levels can be a subtle trap. It can lead to diminishing the importance of anger. They’re all just emotions; just appearances in our minds. We don’t decide when they show up, but we do have the capacity for awareness.
In my experience I’ve found anger to be an immensely important emotion. It signals to me that something very important needs attention. And when entire populations are angry, that’s a really important signal. Granted, following the first thought that follows the anger tends to be unhelpful (it’s easy to villainize). But the initial signaling of importance should not be underplayed.
I think it's more a mix of anxiety, frustration, and exploration.
Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.
Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?
Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.
The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.
More on the frustration: this person with no real world experience is hired and all of a sudden sending me six page articles they themselves couldn't fathom writing and they're lauded by founders and celebrated as pioneers of the company. Nobody in that chain could pick out a race condition from a lineup of cat feces. And I'm the "bad guy" for poking holes in all of the Groundbreaking Computer Science being done.
Wait wait wait. I don’t accept this premise: “But anger is different from anxiety because anger needs to be directed somewhere.” Citation needed; where did this come from? I think it is very possible to be angry without a source or obvious target of that anger; IANAP but my 10-minute googles could not find any authority in the field that would claim this statement.
From the perspective of the article, it seems that not having a target distinction between anxiety and anger would make the two feelings indistinguishable and thus the argument would fall apart. BUT, I do think there is a difference between the rage that comes from anger and the unease that comes from anxiety, and that may be triggered by the uncanny valley feelings from AI or the loss of job security from AI or the feelings of replacement that may come from AI or the environmental concerns that come from AI or the capitalistic underpinnings of the current implementation of AI, the list goes on. Some people may take anxiety from these things, and others may take anger. I don’t see one emotion as being less valid than the other.
Also, I don’t see any use in saying someone shouldn’t be angry or anxious in a particular situation. You can’t control your emotions like that. You can control how you _react_ to your emotions, but not the emotions themselves. I do think that emotional regulation is important in work (and also in life), but that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel what you feel.
Anger is strongly associated with certainty and perceived control, whereas anxiety/fear is much more associated with uncertainty and low control - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7059206/
It is a real shame that yet another previous open source blogger uses his social credit and influence to manipulate programmers. People figure it out quickly these days.
> Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place? One narrative that is pretty pervasive is that if AI will usher in productivity gains, those gains are going to benefit companies rather than employees. And well at least someone at Meta wants that.
> [...]
> My answer to the question of how you can not be angry in tech is that it’s by no way the most only possible feeling. First of all, instead of being angry, you can simply be unsure. The feeling of uncertainty is a much more productive emotional state because it can lead to curiosity.
With respect to Armin, whose work I respect a lot, I think that it is totally valid and in fact productive to reserve a degree of anger and hatred for the hyper-capitalists that are going to use AI to further make the lives of the many worse to further entrench the power of a very, very few.
It is very true that being entirely consumed by anger is bad. At the extremes, it clouds judgment, is bad for your health, and makes you little fun at parties. That said, it's a human emotion and being upset by injustice helps fuel action.
So insofar as we're called to being uncertain and curious, it should perhaps be uncertainty about our current social/class structure and curiosity about how we might change it for the better. If you have the means and the talent, maybe start a worker owned tech co-op. If that doesn't seem likely maybe start talking about organizing a union. Remember when folks said that if tech workers would you unionize, it would upset the good things folks had with wages? Well if tech workers had unionized earlier on, the precarity and anxiety workers feel today might not have come to pass. If now seems like a bad time to unionize, a future where AI usage is more pervasive and better understood might be much worse.
> I think that it is totally valid and in fact productive to reserve a degree of anger and hatred for the hyper-capitalists that are going to use AI to further make the lives of the many worse to further entrench the power of a very, very few.
That’s really the thing. If you understand how badly a few people are accumulating resources and power through the build up of AI, with the very explicit goal to make most people’s life worse, you have to be angry. Its a rational reaction. It doesn’t have to be tamed through an analytical process
Anger and anxiety are normal responses to abnormal and dangerous situations. They should not be changed or ignored, they should be used.
This is the same game. They tried to play with the mindfulness movement in tech. Ignore your anger and just keep coding. And that’s why everyone is more angry and anxious now.
>But anger is different from anxiety because anger needs to be directed somewhere. The feeling of anger suggests that somebody or something is doing something to you.
>Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place?
The author is arguing that you should hone in on the underlying reasons behind emotions. It can be easy to conflate anger and anxiety. It's up to your agency to reflect on your emotions and how you act on them.
You can be angry, but you should name at what and why. Who is propagating the mindfulness movement? How is it affecting you? What can we do differently? Calling out "they" isn't a good answer.
Telling the peasants to suppress anger is the primary means of the ruling classes to induce inaction.
Righteous anger is a healthy and natural response. Those who admonish others to "be curious", to "wait and see", to "be rational" often have an agenda.
Maybe it's AI psychosis speaking but how can you not be excited? You can outsource virtually all electronic drudgery for $100/mo.
I haven't been this excited about tech since I set up my first home server 20+ years ago. And Claude doesn't sounds like an always-on vacuum cleaner (it was a decommissioned proliant).
Agreed! At the moment I have all the tech I really need. I could think up a million interesting side-projects that AI might help come to fruition. However, in reality I have much more banal concerns - like whether I'll still be able to make a decent living using my skills; and whether I'll ever be able to start a family and own a home.
Perhaps this would be far more exciting if I were younger. But right now I'm just trying to figure out if I can survive.
Really? You don't write dockerfiles, ansible playbooks, never wanted something rewritten into typescript so that it also works client-side, or get stuck in some cloud console?
We're redirecting an increasingly large portion of the world's R&D funding into building data centres to run LLMs which can barely speak English ("Good observation - that's the pivot point. I'll land the load bearing backstop.") and which turn what should be 100 lines of code into 4000.
The end result for me has been that I am now a gatekeeper trying to prevent AI slop making its way into systems which I care about, and failing, and getting dragged into meetings with my boss about how my performance has gone down now that I'm chained to this stupid thing and forced to use it for even the most trivial tasks.
I haven't been this upset with PayPal mafia overlords since crypto.
LLMs write samey English that is of significantly higher quality than the median literate native speaker. There's a difference between obnoxious writing and bad writing, and when you claim LLMs can "barely speak English" you've run off the rhetorical cliff of your argument.
> Even if you don’t find what’s happening right now exciting, you can at least find it interesting
I can't get myself to stop finding it terrifying
When I think about my future I am scared. Not uncertain. Not merely anxious. Definitely not excited. I'm quite frightened.
In fairness, I think I'm a bit of an outlier. I already felt my place in society was fairly tenuous. I struggle to make friends. I don't feel I fit in very well. I've never managed to stick at one job for more than a few years. The one thing I'm really quite good at is building software and that's let me stay afloat and thrive somewhat
And that's going to go away. And I'm nowhere near close to retiring.
So no. I'm probably not going to find a way to let my anger give way to curiosity any time soon. I feel under threat and I am scared for my personal future safety and security.
Is this my fault for placing too many of my eggs in one basket? Yeah probably. I regret it a lot. If I could go back in time I would have chosen a different profession and branched into software instead of being all software all the time.
I'm trying to tell myself it's not too late to branch out now, but it's been very difficult
So.. I dunno. I can appreciate what the article is saying, and I think it's probably accurate and useful for other people who are more secure than I am, but... Eh.
I guess I just hope people realize that people like me are out there, not just uncertain but AI is shaping up to be the blow that knocks us off the bridge and into the water
Not at all. I'm in the same boat. The first ten year of being a developer you could see things happening miles away. There was a predictable process. Someone builds a new framework. You do some tutorials, kick the tires. Then it eventually starts showing up in small corp projects, then bigger projects or its dropped in favor of a newer framework, app, platform.
Now? Its all gas no brakes. Just shove AI into everything. No vetting, no testing, just shove it into everything and see what happens. This is not software development to me - this is sprinting towards a brick wall.
I would recommend the same thing I'm doing. Branch out, network like crazy. Talk to people about your skills and see if what else is out there. Look at going into adjacent fields, etc. When I went through the first dot com bust and then the 08' crash? The only thing that saved me was networking. I had a few friends that I was talking to who were getting me interviews and telling me about openings that weren't being published.
Keep your shoulder to the wind and keep pushing, there's light at the end of this, I just don't know how long the tunnel is.
I think a lot of worry/anxiety comes with the desire for stability as we get further into life and career. I remember being in downtown Dallas New Year's Eve 1999 on a headful of LSD praying the lights would go out since Y2K was finally happening. Now, I'm 50 and have a family and still trying to navigate the tech industry like all of us. Societal level mayhem lacks the luster it use to have...
The emotion is fear. Anger is just a reaction to fear. Basically, if we are angry, we are also scared; whether or not we want to admit it.
It's a long topic, and one I know well (I agree with the above summary), but I really don't think that discussing it, would be particularly welcome, here. I know that it isn't often welcome, even with folks that ask to hear it.
I've spent the majority of my adult life, learning to curb and sideline anger. In my experience, my anger has always caused problems. It has never solved a problem.
Ever. Not even one single problem.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
It's just drained my energy, stunted my reasoning, and poisoned relationships. It has caused others to strike back at me, when they didn't need to (which, of course, caused me damage), it has caused problems, where none existed before, and magnified existing ones.
We can't help getting angry, but we sure can help staying angry. That "staying" part is the corrosive agent. Anger is meant to be a temporary burst of energy, to deal with a threat. After the threat has (or has not) been dealt with, anger is supposed to dissipate. It's not supposed to be an "at rest" state (unless you're Bruce Banner).
People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature.
(There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from understanding this; for instance, skilled consultants put a price tag on certainty; you can sell determinism by itself, separate from any product or service you're more overtly offering.)
I think of LLMs as a labor-liberating tool. It's saving me effort so I don't have to drudge through enterprise codebases and memorize company-specific knowledge that is a dead end for my career. Instead I can run an agent while doing chores.
The beauty of the entire LLM stack is that it requires us. It is useless without a human-in-the-loop. The entire stack is designed around human intervention. We will not magically invent a way to remove the human without first removing it from training.
So rest assured, so long as there are humans in the training loop, there's nothing to worry about, because LLMs are a cybernetic enhancement, not a replacement.
But I have never been more anxious. I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind. It didn’t use to be like this.
I felt this way very recently about the one projects I am focusing on. I kept seeing others explore the same space already ahead of me. I thought I'll never make it here because why use my thing when you can already use those things?
There was this extreme sense of urgency, as if I needed to do nothing else in my life but finish this project and get it out there. One day it hit me, and then over the course of a few weeks it settled in, that I was thinking of this from a place of extrinsic motivation. Basically, I was not doing what I wanted, I was doing what I thought others would want from me.
The project now has only two goals.
1. Build the project I want to use for myself, but in a way that will benefit others who happen to want the same thing.
2. The outcome of the project is not the code/app, it's a "changed Me", having learned everything I needed to to build the project.
Eventually I want the project to have a hosted paid platform version. I am not making this platform because I want to make money (I do, but that's besides the point). I am making this platform because I want experience in doing the types of things that can make money.
The whole thing now has become internally oriented in a way that allows me to no longer feel time pressure or be outcome oriented.
I went from feeling burned out spending all my time on this (I shed all other hobbies and activities), to having a great time spending all my time on this. The same amount of time/effort now feels indefinitely sustainable.
Framing is really one of the most powerful methods of emotional regulation. Whatever you are doing, make it relaxed and fun!
However, I think putting anger and curiosity on two levels can be a subtle trap. It can lead to diminishing the importance of anger. They’re all just emotions; just appearances in our minds. We don’t decide when they show up, but we do have the capacity for awareness.
In my experience I’ve found anger to be an immensely important emotion. It signals to me that something very important needs attention. And when entire populations are angry, that’s a really important signal. Granted, following the first thought that follows the anger tends to be unhelpful (it’s easy to villainize). But the initial signaling of importance should not be underplayed.
Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.
Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?
Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.
The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.
That's what's frustrating.
From the perspective of the article, it seems that not having a target distinction between anxiety and anger would make the two feelings indistinguishable and thus the argument would fall apart. BUT, I do think there is a difference between the rage that comes from anger and the unease that comes from anxiety, and that may be triggered by the uncanny valley feelings from AI or the loss of job security from AI or the feelings of replacement that may come from AI or the environmental concerns that come from AI or the capitalistic underpinnings of the current implementation of AI, the list goes on. Some people may take anxiety from these things, and others may take anger. I don’t see one emotion as being less valid than the other.
Also, I don’t see any use in saying someone shouldn’t be angry or anxious in a particular situation. You can’t control your emotions like that. You can control how you _react_ to your emotions, but not the emotions themselves. I do think that emotional regulation is important in work (and also in life), but that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel what you feel.
> [...]
> My answer to the question of how you can not be angry in tech is that it’s by no way the most only possible feeling. First of all, instead of being angry, you can simply be unsure. The feeling of uncertainty is a much more productive emotional state because it can lead to curiosity.
With respect to Armin, whose work I respect a lot, I think that it is totally valid and in fact productive to reserve a degree of anger and hatred for the hyper-capitalists that are going to use AI to further make the lives of the many worse to further entrench the power of a very, very few.
It is very true that being entirely consumed by anger is bad. At the extremes, it clouds judgment, is bad for your health, and makes you little fun at parties. That said, it's a human emotion and being upset by injustice helps fuel action.
So insofar as we're called to being uncertain and curious, it should perhaps be uncertainty about our current social/class structure and curiosity about how we might change it for the better. If you have the means and the talent, maybe start a worker owned tech co-op. If that doesn't seem likely maybe start talking about organizing a union. Remember when folks said that if tech workers would you unionize, it would upset the good things folks had with wages? Well if tech workers had unionized earlier on, the precarity and anxiety workers feel today might not have come to pass. If now seems like a bad time to unionize, a future where AI usage is more pervasive and better understood might be much worse.
That’s really the thing. If you understand how badly a few people are accumulating resources and power through the build up of AI, with the very explicit goal to make most people’s life worse, you have to be angry. Its a rational reaction. It doesn’t have to be tamed through an analytical process
This is the same game. They tried to play with the mindfulness movement in tech. Ignore your anger and just keep coding. And that’s why everyone is more angry and anxious now.
>Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place?
The author is arguing that you should hone in on the underlying reasons behind emotions. It can be easy to conflate anger and anxiety. It's up to your agency to reflect on your emotions and how you act on them.
You can be angry, but you should name at what and why. Who is propagating the mindfulness movement? How is it affecting you? What can we do differently? Calling out "they" isn't a good answer.
Tell us what we can do against the mindless slop! DDoS Anthropic?
Righteous anger is a healthy and natural response. Those who admonish others to "be curious", to "wait and see", to "be rational" often have an agenda.
Like this author who is invested in AI.
I haven't been this excited about tech since I set up my first home server 20+ years ago. And Claude doesn't sounds like an always-on vacuum cleaner (it was a decommissioned proliant).
Perhaps this would be far more exciting if I were younger. But right now I'm just trying to figure out if I can survive.
I find it great for experiments to throw away but I wish everyone remembered step 2 more often.
The end result for me has been that I am now a gatekeeper trying to prevent AI slop making its way into systems which I care about, and failing, and getting dragged into meetings with my boss about how my performance has gone down now that I'm chained to this stupid thing and forced to use it for even the most trivial tasks.
I haven't been this upset with PayPal mafia overlords since crypto.
There is nothing fun about programming anymore. The joy is completely gone. I would switch careers if I could make money elsewhere.
"Electronic drudgery" is how I earn my income which pays for my food and shelter. That's why I'm not excited.
I can't get myself to stop finding it terrifying
When I think about my future I am scared. Not uncertain. Not merely anxious. Definitely not excited. I'm quite frightened.
In fairness, I think I'm a bit of an outlier. I already felt my place in society was fairly tenuous. I struggle to make friends. I don't feel I fit in very well. I've never managed to stick at one job for more than a few years. The one thing I'm really quite good at is building software and that's let me stay afloat and thrive somewhat
And that's going to go away. And I'm nowhere near close to retiring.
So no. I'm probably not going to find a way to let my anger give way to curiosity any time soon. I feel under threat and I am scared for my personal future safety and security.
Is this my fault for placing too many of my eggs in one basket? Yeah probably. I regret it a lot. If I could go back in time I would have chosen a different profession and branched into software instead of being all software all the time.
I'm trying to tell myself it's not too late to branch out now, but it's been very difficult
So.. I dunno. I can appreciate what the article is saying, and I think it's probably accurate and useful for other people who are more secure than I am, but... Eh.
I guess I just hope people realize that people like me are out there, not just uncertain but AI is shaping up to be the blow that knocks us off the bridge and into the water
Not at all. I'm in the same boat. The first ten year of being a developer you could see things happening miles away. There was a predictable process. Someone builds a new framework. You do some tutorials, kick the tires. Then it eventually starts showing up in small corp projects, then bigger projects or its dropped in favor of a newer framework, app, platform.
Now? Its all gas no brakes. Just shove AI into everything. No vetting, no testing, just shove it into everything and see what happens. This is not software development to me - this is sprinting towards a brick wall.
I would recommend the same thing I'm doing. Branch out, network like crazy. Talk to people about your skills and see if what else is out there. Look at going into adjacent fields, etc. When I went through the first dot com bust and then the 08' crash? The only thing that saved me was networking. I had a few friends that I was talking to who were getting me interviews and telling me about openings that weren't being published.
Keep your shoulder to the wind and keep pushing, there's light at the end of this, I just don't know how long the tunnel is.