Comment by bigstrat2003
20 hours ago
There's nothing to be excited for. Even if AI works as well as people say (and to be clear: it very much doesn't), that future sucks ass. No more fun making things, no fun solving problems, just hand it off to the machine that does things for you. That's an awful future where every shred of joy is gone from computing.
It might genuinely suck for you. It's amazing for people who couldn't build anything before, but now can. And there's more of them than you.
> It's amazing for people who couldn't build anything before, but now can.
(Raises hand.) I'm doing things with my online law-school course materials, in just a few minutes using Claude, that I never even considered doing before because I didn't want to take the time to improve my rudimentary JavaScript- and CSS skills. Instead of just a fairly-simple, single-page HTML document, Claude is helping me turn the materials into something genuinely useful for both my students and practitioners.
Yes. I have a really hard time getting past the sheer scale of enablement for normal people, and we're stacking it up against, what, the joy professional developers get out of hand-cutting dovetail keys? And then like a whole cinematic universe about how if all the joinery isn't hand-cut, everything's going to collapse, which, like, obviously no.
One of my favorite journalists is Jerusalem Demsas, who just on a podcast mentioned --- in passing --- that she'd vibe-coded the photo editor they were using for her publication. That's a bananas statement! And we're all just, shrug, or worse: "that's slop!"
Don't get me wrong, I think we'll print money hats off this sentiment. By all means, do whatever you can to leave the lane we're building in as open and stigmatized as possible!
Those people who couldn't build anything before still can't.
This is obviously false.
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I think that it should not need to be mutually exclusive. You can make it you can enter the programs yourself (if you prefer to do for whatever reason, including, it does not work well (like you mention), or because of Dijkstra objection or other objections to the use of AI for programming the computer or AI in general), but that AI can also be possible.
It sucks that most of those people are going to be entirely dependent on a proprietary service to build things for them and they will never actually bother learning or improving their skills, even though the tools to do so have never been more freely and widely available.
It also sucks that so many people in tech think that the widespread loss of education, knowledge and freedom is a good thing.
I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.
I get that it might suck for people like us, who took the time to learn those languages! Oh well.
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I find it is an amplifier of my skills, not a replacement.
I have never been able to understand this perspective. It's come up so often that it almost feels like a pro-AI propaganda strawman in the style of the "virgin vs chad" meme.
You can and should still write most of the code yourself and use AI to assist when you get stuck. Apart from saving yourself some hours because you no longer hit dead ends on google, I don't understand how that's meaningfully different from using a search engine and finding solutions on StackOverflow and GitHub. I don't even understand how people think this traditional workflow I'm suggesting is any slower than reviewing LLM output either. It takes the same cognitive load and the same time in the end. The only people who believe they can go faster and reduce cognitive load aren't just inexperienced, but also seem to have ADHD or something. Like they just wanna bask in the vibes of the machine-generated text scrolling by.
If your goal is to make something you're going to live with and maintain long term, or is more generally the foundation of a bigger idea, you can't ignore any part of the code or delegate it away. It's still writing that you're bound by like any other document.
> I have never been able to understand this perspective. It's come up so often that it almost feels like a pro-AI propaganda strawman in the style of the "virgin vs chad" meme.
The "strawman" comes from the businesses promoting the frontier LLMs and many of the best-known influencers in the space, especially on Xitter.
You're welcome to not make things.
Are you telling us the only reason why making things was fun is because it made you "special"? And now that anyone can do it it isn't worth it for you anymore?
That's the wrong reason to do something.
For me, I made things because I liked the process of making things, it was never really about the result. Much like solving crossword puzzles is about the process itself, not about getting the answer.
Then nothing has changed. You're free to continue doing things as you like.
Unless you're complaining you can't be paid to do it the old way. But none of us were paid to have fun, we were paid to deliver results.
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