Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The notion that one's economic output is equal to one's worth as a person seems pretty wrong-headed, when considering what the purpose of life is.
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The happiest I've ever been
71–80 of 402 posts
Re: The happiest I've ever been
#72Re: The happiest I've ever been
#73Re: The happiest I've ever been
#74These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do…
One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.
I look at it like this: Yes, AI can write code. It can write it much faster than I can. Sometimes it can also write it better than I can.
But: programming languages, libraries, and abstractions are not going away. It is still possible (and might always be possible) to get deep into the weeds of Python or Rust or whatever to understand how those work and really harness them to their full potential, or develop them further. It just won't be _compulsary_ (in most industries) if your only goal is to trade lines of code for dollars in your bank account.
Re: The happiest I've ever been
#75Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in: FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year. Then I…
We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c. But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
> We're retiring later and later, working more per week
That may be true. But, if somebody offered me a time machine to travel back in time and live at any point in history, would I take it? Hell no.
> purchasing power is going down
That is not a new thing.
> quality of goods is going down
Phones are better. Computers are better. Cars, planes, washing machines ...
> life expectancy is decreasing
On the whole, this is not the case.
> child mortality is increasing
Globally?
> illiteracy is increasing
Globally?
You seem to have a negative view of things. And sure, many things are not great. But the examples you gave are not it.
Re: The happiest I've ever been
#76Re: The happiest I've ever been
#77The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.
Carpentry has always been an implementation detail for making furniture. They have been able to purchase flat-pack chairs for all of their lives, but for some reason there are people who learn this skill and have fun slowly making things that factories already make at scale. A subset of those people have made lucrative businesses out of the very human craft that is carpentry, and are able to create custom pieces on-demand that you could never justify retooling a factory to create.
It is okay to view code as a means to an end. I disagree, preferring to treat code as craft, and striving for better systems that are easy to understand, maintain and extend. And I think that's the source of our disconnect; deeper than one's opinion about AI is one's value of human skill and the effect that has on the output. Maybe I overvalue it, and maybe creating code "manually" is going to look more like carpentry in the future; but you cannot expect to convince a skilled carpenter that an IKEA chair is just as good and accomplishes the same task.
Re: The happiest I've ever been
#78In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is. You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast. Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement jus…
There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
Childlessness seems to be an increasingly compassionate choice. Degrowth by force.
Re: The happiest I've ever been
#79These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do…
> (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years)
We definitely saw some kind of non-linear step function jump in quality around the beginning of the year - it's hard to express how good Claude opus/sonnet 4.6 is now. However, I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of improvement from here? It's kind of like we got to the 80% point but the next 20% is going to be a lot harder/take longer than that first 80% (pareto principle). Also, as more and more code out there is AI generated it's going to be like the snake eating it's own tail. Training models on AI generated code doesn't seem like it will lead to improvements.
Re: The happiest I've ever been
#80The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.
If you see programming purely as a means to an end, then yeah, I get this perspective. But to many there is enjoyment in the _doing_ and the craft of it beyond the end result. It’s why people get into woodworking or knitting despite the fact that it’s much cheaper, faster, and easier to buy a table or a sweater than to make one yourself. Value is subjective, and for some the value of code is not primarily in what you can sell to others.