Job Security Anxiety

“I was kind of looking at maybe going back to school to learn an extra skill that maybe is more human centric because that human touch I think is going to be more of what keeps people employed.”

“Am I inadvertently working myself out of a job? And then if that's the case, then what am I going to make that I can commoditize to stay afloat.”

“So my accessibility and content designers are a little concerned that as accessibility builds this really cool thing in Cursor to remind everybody to be accessible that they've trained this agent to do they're like okay well are they still going to have me in three years or will there just be less of us?”

“I mean there's already great concerns about replacement. And I think the people who are actually hands-on with the work kind of understand that it's not there at least not yet to do kind of full replacement.”

“Anxious. Just because of the fact it just seems like it's come on too fast, too strong, too quickly. And without anybody really understanding any of the ramifications, governance, ethics, environmental concerns, economic concerns. Again, when the Sam Altman types of the world will talk about this golden utopia in the future where nobody has to do any sort of like drudgery work anymore. It's like, well, no offense to anybody, but the economy runs on an awful lot of people doing drudgery work. And what happens when all, you're just going to say these people just live a carefree life with no job anymore because there's nothing for them to do and they just have this limitless free time now because all that overhead has been lifted from their lives.”

“So I just don't know. I feel like it's just, I've said to my wife in the past, I think in the future, unfortunately, when we look back 30 years from now on this era of technological advancement, I think the legacy of this phase of AI, this gold rush mentality, is just going to really be exposing the greed of C-level executives in the world right now in that they would put their faith in anything which will allow them to say, "I'm the person who cut staff expenses by 30% and as a result you stakeholders all got higher dividends and I got a bigger bonus, so everybody wins." But that's just not true.”

“I think unless you know how to use it, most of the, I don't see UX designers surviving in 10 years from now. It's sad that I'm saying this, I mean, I'm passionate about that, but AI is taking over. So anybody who has strategic thinking can take over anything. You know, you can use any tool to do graphical design, UX design, anything that was done by a human before as far as creativity can be done by AI.”

“Yeah. I mean, I think what we're trying to do, which we've been trying to do for the past couple years, is really ambitious, which is to create healthcare applications with a sort of modular application building tool and to create the whole backend so that their applications are possible to be used within the healthcare context. And I think late last year, as we've been struggling through putting this [application] all together, one of our engineers started leaning more into Claude Code at the same time that some of the big advances happened and made a ton of progress and was able to hook up our own instance of an LLM to start creating those applications and it actually worked. We had the building blocks figured out and it was putting it together in a way that was like, oh, we thought that this would come at some point and now it's come and now we have to catch up and work around it and try to figure out. And for me as a designer it was like all of a sudden”

“I'm maybe not one step behind but two or three steps behind. There was one instance where we've been discussing the experience of using conversational AI in our tool and what the engineer had done was working but it was kind of overwhelming in terms of everything that was a part of the UX. And so we were trying to find time for me to collaborate with him because he's been building with AI. And that was I think the first moment I'm like okay I'm just going to see what I can do with Claude Code and start doing it. And I kind of just went in deep for a couple days and was able to rebuild it with Claude Code successfully to, just the front end, but to illustrate the experience that we wanted and it felt like okay now I can kind of play, now it's kind of like fighting fire with fire like I can compete a little bit in that process. And so that was really impressive to me for the first time.”

“There's an aspect of it that feels very empowering when I'm trying to build out an idea quickly. There's been a couple times where I'm building something in Claude Code and it's felt like it's nice to have an iterative design process in actual code. Which is really cool. Like I used to work in Flash a long long time ago and when we were doing work in Flash, Flash was the output because it would be embedded into a website. So you were building what would be the final product which felt really gratifying and so there's an aspect of that that I appreciate. But it also feels like in general there's so much anxiety around it. And it feels like I don't have a choice. Like I don't have a choice but to fight fire with fire because that's what's going on, to sort of keep up and not be left behind, and that doesn't feel great.”

“And that's kind of the goal of the company is to get to that. So in essence, I'm building my replacement, which is going to be this robot. And I say that jokingly, but it's also serious. And I understand that that's really what's happening.”

“And that isn't software anymore. That's something else. I don't know. And we're in that period right now where we're learning these tools, trying to make the company successful because we have to use the tools because we're afraid that if we don't find a way to... and I don't know what the end is, how it's going to stabilize, right? It's shifting month by month. It's shifting.”