Comment by zamalek
20 days ago
This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion, the only difference being that many people can appreciate human art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the code?
I love programming, but most of that joy doesn't come from the type of programming I get paid to do. I now have more time and energy for the fun type, and I can go do things that were previously inconceivable!
Last night "I" "made" 3D boids swarm with directional color and perlin noise turbulence. "I" "did" this without knowing how to do the math for any of those things. (My total involvement at the source level was fiddling with the neighbor distance.)
https://jsbin.com/ququzoxete/edit?html,output
Then I turned them into weird proteins
https://jsbin.com/hayominica/edit?html,output
(As a side note, the loss of meaning of "self" and "doing" overlaps weirdly with my meditation practice...)
Yes but did you learn anything?
Haven't done much more with the boids yet (though I imagine if I continue, I will learn a thing or two!) but I have an example from another domain.
Shell scripting was something that I failed to get any real traction with for decades, and since letting AI help me write dozens of shell scripts, I find that I have gained a basic level of proficiency. (i.e. I found that I had become relatively fluent in writing them even without assistance, which surprised me!)
It ties in with the Input Hypothesis of language acquisition. More volume in = more opportunities for brain to find the patterns, and learn them naturally.
That doesn't work for the approach where you don't look at the code at all, though. Which seems to depend on your goals for the project.
For the boids thing, the math isn't something I enjoy doing manually anyway (I've done that for the last 15 years and it always felt like pulling teeth), so the main learning I'd get there would be at the applied level... How to tweak the Perlin noise to get the result I want, rather than how or why it works in the first place.
Obviously that matters, but how much does it matter? Does it matter if you don't learn anything about computer architecture because you only code in JS all day? Very situational.
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I think this is really it. Being a musician was never a very reliable way to earn a living, but it was a passion. A genuine expression of talent and feeling through the instrument. And if you were good enough you could pay the bills doing work work for studios, commercials, movies, theater. If you were really good you could perform as a headliner.
Now, AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants, eliminating almost all the anonymous studio, commercial, and soundtrack work. If you're really good you can still perform as a headliner, but (this is a guess) 80% of the work for musicians is just gone.
> AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants
It only sounds like music.
At least for this article it's more about the job, or to be precise, the past where job and passion coincided:
> Ultimately if you have a mortgage and a car payment and a family you love, you’re going to make your decision.
Nothing is preventing the author from continuing to write code by hand and enjoy it. The difference is that people won't necessarily pay for it.
The old way was really incredible (and worth mourning), considering in other industries, how many people can only enjoy what they do outside of work.
I disagree a bit. Coding can remain an artistic passion for you indefinitely, it's just your ability to demand that everyone crafts each line of code artisinally won't be subsidized by your employer for much longer. There will probably always be a heavily diminished demand for handcrafted code.
The people outside of us didn’t care about your beautiful code before. Now we can quickly build their boring applications and spend more time building beautiful things for our community’s sake. Yes, there are economic concerns, but as far as “craft” goes, nothing is stopping us from continuing to enjoy it.
I'd add part of the craft is enjoying those minutiae, sharing lessons, and stories with others. The number of people you can do that with is going to dwindle (and has been for a long time from the tech sphere's coopting of all of it). That's part that I mourn.
Except that's not really true, because the work expands to fill the time allotted. Now we can build more boring applications with fewer people.
Yes, it is true that companies are always hungry for more. But once again, those same companies never cared about beautiful code. They wanted us to build something that works as quickly as possible. In my experience, the beauty of programming was often enjoyed outside of work for this very reason, and we can still enjoy it outside of work for it's own sake.
> Coding is a passion for some of us.
It's a passion for me too, but LLMs don't change this for me. Do they change it for you?
Huge tangent but curiosity is killing me: By any chance is your username based on the Egyptian football club Zamalek?
Is coding a passion only because other people appreciate it?
Is painting a passion because others appreciate it? No, it is a passion in itself.
There will always be people appreciating coding by hand as a passion.
My passions - drawing, writing, coding - are worthwhile in themselves, not because other people care about them. Almost noone does.