Comment by agentultra

Can’t be disappointed if you don’t use it.

I’ve never met so many people that hate programming so much.

You get the same thing with artists. Some product manager executive thinks their ideas are what people value. Automating away the frustration of having to manage skilled workers is costly and annoying. Nobody cares how it was made. They only care about the end result. You’re not an artist if all you had to do was write a prompt.

Every AI-bro rant is about how capital-inefficient humans are. About how fallible we are. About how replaceable we are.

The whole aesthetic has a, “good art vs. bad art,” parallel to it. Where people who think for themselves and write code in service of their work and curiosity are displayed as inferior and unfit. Anyone who is using AI workflows are proper and good. If you are not developing software using this methodology then you are a relic, unfit, unstable, and undesirable.

Of course it’s all predicated in being dependent on a big tech firm, paying subscription fees and tokens to take a gamble at the AI slot machine in hopes that you’ll get a program that works the way you want it to.

Just don’t play the game. Keep writing useless programs by hand. Implement a hash table in C or assembly if you want. Write a parser for a data format you use. Make a Doom clone. Keep learning and having fun. Satisfaction comes from mastery and understanding.

Understanding fundamental algorithms, data structures, and program composition never gets old. We still use algebra today. That stuff is hundreds of years old.