Comment by GPerson
10 hours ago
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.
I actually think that’s a great use of AI, and sounds similar to some of my use cases.
“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.”
Yea I’ve had similar thoughts. Other thoughts have been something like “I’ll have different types of projects and try to be thoughtful in advance about what this is doing for me. If it’s about the building up a system manually and slowly, and having that kind of experience, then I’ll only use the AI maybe as a primary source gatherer or maybe in some limited sense.” And “Okay well this is an MMO and even though in the past I would have wanted to program this plug-in, I guess I’m middle aged now and there’s only so much time and I’d probably be really excited about using my programming energy on these dozen other things I’ve always wanted to work on, and having the thing would be a strict positive compared to not having the thing, so I’ll have the AI make this plug-in which makes the game (which is about play) more fun.”
Programming is a lot of things, so the ambiguity of language probably causes a lot of conflict here.
Yeah! And now the mod has fixed input events, I can actually have a proper configuration GUI for this, and I could I suppose write a GUI toolkit for the nth time, but it kind of feels like the sort of thing that's barely cool the first time, lol. And I already know if I let Sonnet or Opus do it, it'll work fine after the third try or so, and what's more it's going to look a lot better. And I'll enjoy using it every time instead of half-dreading finding another bug.
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