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Comment by topgrain2

3 hours ago

> My current power move in the age of AI: do nothing.

This was also my strategy before AI. At some point in my late 20s or early 30s I all but completely stopped doing any development in my free time, because I was entirely over any fun I derived from coding per se (in truth, I'd never been that into it, I'd just been really bad at guessing what would or would not be worth spending time on) and, as they say, the "juice wasn't worth the squeeze" for almost anything that popped into my head that might be a nice program or script to have (like that xkcd chart about the payoff time for developing programs that save X minutes per week or whatever) or else it was something that wasn't necessary but might just be interesting or fun to have, but nowhere near worth the many hours it'd take to make it happen. If someone made what I wanted and released it, awesome! If not, oh well.

The big change with LLMs is now I can shit out little scripts and such in a few minutes and for pennies, maybe a couple dollars. I'm dragging old extremely-niche ideas out of mothballs because what would have been several weekends of work (most of these ideas would require lots of poking around unfamiliar APIs and documentation, not just immediately writing the thing I want) can now be done in a half-hour or less—or, at least, I can find out if something's going to be unworkable or too fiddly to screw with after all and should be completely and permanently abandoned, in minutes rather than hours.