A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

So you seem to be opposing entropsilk‘s argument, same as I did.

> GenAI will remove constraints.

I think this really hits on the difference in our understanding because constraints are what cause actual creativity and art to happen.

A lack of constraints is why big-budget movies are so tedious. Lower budget movies are better because of their constraints.

Yes.

A more obvious example is The Blair Witch Project, which cost less than a million dollars even after all the marketing was done (and cost essentially nothing to make).

The original Halloween was a very low-budget movie considering how long it took to shoot.

Vin Diesel's career was established by his own movie, Strays, which cost less than $50K. Which is zero budget, essentially, for a film that opened at Sundance.

Away from films there are many, many examples of massively popular albums and songs that were made essentially for nothing off the back of simple constraints and creativity.

In the long run, the only way artists will use AI effectively is by deciding on constraints that limit its use.

Because as soon as you don't limit its use, anyone can do what you can do.

So I tend towards thinking that AI won't really move the needle in terms of human creativity. It may reframe it. But nobody is going to be liberated creatively by it.

Tech people, I suspect, tend to assume that AI brings "full creative freedom" to artists the same way a patron does when they say "you can have full creative freedom".

It's not the same kind of freedom.

> I don't think it is helpful to gatekeep movie making with arbitrary requirements regarding AI usage

I am not gatekeeping at all; I don't understand this argument that this could ever be perceived as gatekeeping. I'm just saying that in my own experience, indie creators tend to perceive generative AI as bullshit, not as liberation.

Artists who tell you that AI is not helping art are not gatekeeping either.

I'm having trouble with the concept of claiming that one "wrote" something that was entirely, or almost-entirely, generated by AI. I use Tesla's FSD all of the time. When it's on, I'm "driving" insofar as I'm monitoring my surroundings and preparing to take over if the car does something crazy. However, I'll usually tell people that the car drove, not me.

I also don't understand the value of using AI to write stuff in loads of unfamiliar languages. I get why one might choose Rust vs. Golang vs. JavaScript depending on the mission, but I would think that those differences go away entirely when you're depending on an LLM to author something in those languages AND you aren't skilled enough in those languages to understand when something's suboptimal or not. This just feels like an express train to bankruptcy via technical debt.

I'm also having trouble with the notion of AI accelerating the creation of side projects. For me, actually writing the code (or figuring out how the language works) is part of the fun that I get from doing side projects. If I wanted to create something as quickly as possible, I'd just buy a SaaS subscription or physical version for what I want.

It's also insane to me that we're just not AT ALL considering how LLMs stunt the growth of our juniors. Spending hours banging my head against the wall on tiny bugs is how I got to where I am today. I'm going to guess that's the case for many of the people on HN as well. That learning process goes away entirely once an LLM goes into the mix. You can just ask it to fix whatever's broken, no understanding of the bug required. This is fine for seniors who know why things happen how they happen, but I can't imagine juniors making up this skill gap.

It's like learning a new language vs having your phone generate whatever in the target language. The end result is the same, but there's no way you can really learn that language with your phone doing the work, unless one assigns no value to learning that language in the first place.

Finally, I have trouble accepting the idea of giving up the keyboard once you become an "architect." I very much understand that us "architects" have less free time in the day to fire up the IDE (death by meetings, basically), but giving that up entirely feels somewhat career-limiting to me. Then again, this is a moot point if the market moves towards making software development an AI-only activity.

What's crazy to me is that most developers and architects sneered at low/no-code solutions because they created unmaintainable codebases that were too proprietary to make sense of, yet here we are lapping up code generated by "coder" LLMs and accepting that they "might" produce insecure code here and there. Insane.