Hi, I’m 40 and an experienced coder and software architect. I’ve been working with AI since around 1998, so I have some perspective. LLMs and neural networks have made massive leaps in the last four years—leaps that have made even my own predictions look outdated. Now it feels like every week there’s a flood of news about new tools and mind-blowing results, while the companies I do project work for still rely on good old “manual craftsmanship.” Personally, I notice that thanks to years of coding I’m pretty good at debugging and curating the outputs of tools like Claude and others. But honestly, neither my project work nor my small side projects really make me happy. At the same time, I’m working almost 80 hours a week on all these “construction sites” without feeling like any of it actually has meaningful impact. Then I open Instagram or TikTok and every random guy is trying to sell me his AI workflows and tools. And every AI goth girl is showing more than I, as a married man, probably should see. And always the same affiliate nonsense: “Comment ‘B-AI-TCH’ and you’ll get the full stack, blah blah blah.” It irritates me massively, because it makes me think there must be some 23-year-old hyper-consumers out there already working on their tenth million while I’m tweaking CSS for a login screen. Anyway, I’m noticing that a real concern is creeping in about staying truly up to date. At times it even borders on panic—that I’m completely failing to use my potential. I can basically do almost anything: concept work, automation (n8n/zapier), design, UI/UX, frontend, backend, infrastructure, cloud. And yet I still find myself wondering: should I just switch and start doing AI-UGC or generating “hotties” to drain the bank accounts of lonely guys over 40 (aka simps)? Right now I feel totally adrift. ChatGPT tells me not to worry—but that’s also just an AI. What are you all doing? How do you stay up to date? What tools are you using to actually make money with AI? And would anyone be interested in exchanging ideas privately and finally “getting something going”? Thanks for your time and any advice. submitted by /u/SharkeyOOO
Originally posted by u/SharkeyOOO on r/ArtificialInteligence