I grieve. I came to software development because I wanted to write. I studied literature in school, and I wanted to put pen to paper, to read and write and to communicate with other humans about the things that matter to me. But the academy graduates far more literature students than there are positions for writers and teachers, and the market promised me that if I learned to write code instead of human language, I would never want for a steady paycheck. And so I dug in, creating open source projects on GitHub to make a portfolio, and reassuring myself that software development was primarily a way that humans communicated with each other about how we want the systems around us to work. I had hope — I could write C# to talk to my coworkers about how health care should work, or Java to talk about how financial systems should work, or JavaScript to talk about how people should find jobs, and the fact that a computer was eavesdropping was incidental to the project.

And I think what is so mournful for me is that my voice is preserved forever in these LLMs. They’ve scraped everything I’ve ever done, and joined me into the shared song of all of humanity and lowered the barriers to entry for new software developers and everything should be beautiful and shared, but instead of it being the great equalizer that allows users to finally generate the custom software for themselves they’ve always wanted, and never been able to articulate to me, we’ve stolen the entire intellectual history of the human race to help a small cadre of fascists burn the planet. I fell for it, completely, and that’s what I grieve for most.