Comment by GPerson
8 hours ago
Well I used to imagine I’d make a business out of the thing. I also would sometimes think the thing could give me professional opportunities.
8 hours ago
Well I used to imagine I’d make a business out of the thing. I also would sometimes think the thing could give me professional opportunities.
Sure. I do agree that AI is a problem in this sense: programmer skill as a hiring differentiator is becoming a lot less legible these days. It just feels personally odd to be the reason you do the thing. When I encountered my first programmable computer I very quickly realized that I wanted to do more of it, and not too much later that this was the thing I would spend the rest of my life doing. That it was also very commercializable, I have always considered as a kind of happy accident.
That’s my experience, starting at 10 years old and trying to figure out how the the moving pictures were in the screen.
I didn’t say that was the reason though. A person has a lot of wants and needs right?
I’m not following why it’s strange to want to be skilled and engage with the craft itself based on that part of the message to be honest. Maybe I’m misunderstanding.
I tried to convey in my first post that I’m gonna keep programming for no material gain and no way of producing anything of value for others. I am worried about how I’ll support myself but this thread is about the hobby.
That's fair, I think I read something into your comment that wasn't really in there...
Personally speaking, the feeling of "getting the thing and then having the thing" - the personal todo app, the custom apps - is why I do anything in programming. Programming is the project where I can speak a spell and then I get a nice thing. That's very cool, and I do like the process, but at the end of the day the nice thing is what I'm doing it for- it's not a side benefit, it's the payoff. I get a burst of happiness every time that the thing quietly does its thing that I wouldn't have had otherwise. So to me, the LLM mostly just feels like I suddenly got a lot of friends who are willing to help me get the thing and also have a very complementary skillset. So it's an improvement, and then there's also a reward at the end!
Example: I'm playing Satisfactory right now, with a mod that puts a computer in the game that can control game events. I use the computer to do cargo train routing in the game, ie. it runs a program that scans target cargo depots and looks for items that are below a level, and then dispatches trains to find these items and bring them to the destination. Which I once would have written by hand, but was now done entirely by Sonnet. I did have to put plenty of effort into guiding Sonnet to the approach that worked, and I put several AIs together, and this felt a lot like "explaining something" which is a process I enjoy uncomplicatedly anyways. And I think, to be honest, the enjoyment I would have gotten out of the programming part once, was very largely "type-2 fun"- an annoyance followed by a nice reward. Now I'm getting the nice reward for free and can focus on actual industrial and rail network design. And I still get a burst of happiness every time I see a train busily speed off to a new destination. So far as I can tell, at least for me it's all upside.
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