Almost everyone is now about to feel what Lee Sedol felt a decade ago. We are all Lee Sedol.
I didn't immediately get the reference. He is the Korean Go player who lost to AlphaGo in 2016.
Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
21–30 of 100 posts
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#22I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents. I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?
I think there’s still value in hand made furniture with little to no power tool involvement. There’s certainly value in creating furniture yourself in this way.
It doesn’t give answer the question about the people who loved that job , the many old school carpenters who had to adapt or give up.
I wonder if hand coding will become mostly a hobby and maybe a niche market. I’m not saying I like it, that’s tbd, but I wonder about it.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#23When using AI you're not the one doing the work, thus you don't feel the same satisfaction as crafting something yourself, nor does it incite any passion.
I had the same feeling at some point, until I went back to coding by hand just to exercise my skills, and I have to say after a while it felt so much better and I was hooked on working my little side project. Using AI doesn't scratch the same itch for me.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#24[dead]
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#25Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#26I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents. I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?
I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools. I think the more apt comparison would be a carpenter to a mass produced factory. If you've read any of Yegge's recent ramblings than factories of factories seem to be what the AI focused pe…
> I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools.
I suspect there's some survivorship bias at play here. You don't hear what the tradesmen who shied away from using powertools thought because they ceased to find work as tradesmen.
In the same way, future software makers will all be raving about their favorite LLM.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#27Because you perceive a readily available result to be worth less? Why do something whose value has gone down?
AI is like being a manager. To someone who was never interested in that, it certainly feels like your new job is not as good.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#28Many people who enjoyed building and coding things are going through this right now, myself included.
In my case, I felt that I was pretty good at rapid product prototyping and had made that part of my identity. Then AI agents made it trivial. It took me some time to process and accept that reality. But I’m okay with it now. I simply had to move on.
After a while, I found two things that have helped:
1. Leaning into other areas where AI can boost my skills rather than just replace them, such as writing (for example, my last two posts made it to the front page of HN) and sales (leads, proposals, etc)
2. Taking on more ambitious projects. I used to think about side projects I could complete in days, and now I think more about projects I can complete in months. With AI, days have become hours and months have become days, so I simply try to think of projects that would have taken me a long time before.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is another thing I find frustrating, but I don't know the right way to express it. A lot of this AI tooling/coding seems self-indulgent? 'I built a better software factory!'. The tools are very powerful, but I don't see the results yet. The frustration outweighs results. I am underwater dealing with it. I am getting outlandish PRs against Pion. So I spend my time triaging and feel burned out. The 'AI future' I w…
Please don't forget you are under no obligation to triage all the awful things. You are well within your rights to require submitters reach a certain standard before you will review their request. Your time is finite and precious. Your project benefits from your enthusiasm and knowledge. It does not benefit from you acting as human reviewer of a tsunami of low quality content. You are allowed to be ruthlessly protect…
This begs an importent question: how? How do you filter without putting up barriers that high quality contributors will not want to climb?
I ask both as a maintainer who has been overwhelmed and as someone who declines to participate in communities where the bar is set too high for casual drive-by contributions.
Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?
#30Because I'm guessing your passion was for the craft and not just the result.
Before there were factories, if you wanted a chair you needed an artisan to make one for you. When factories pumped out chairs, there was no need for the artisan to make chairs. But building factories that made chairs was a craft in itself. If you wanted a factory to make chairs, you needed an artisan to set one up for you. A craft became redundant, but enabled another to exist.
It's natural to mourn a craft that becomes redundant. But such an event is not unique.
I do think there is something different about AI, though, in that it attacks the craft of cognition itself. At some point there's no room for a human artisan to build on top. The required faculties become too great for any human mind.