Feeling Sad about AI

I personally don't understand what's bad about AI being able to do much of the route, boring, crappy parts of programming. The same way SAP, salesforce, etc were never good products from the point of view of a company, other than enabling a corporate workflow and legal compliance, that was needlessly complex, they still got used when for a fraction of the "subscription" + consultants a better more fit to purpose solution could have been built - much leaner and meaner and to the point, actually enabling empowerment of the company's staff and market differentiation. AI without proper guidance will be the same.

Just a few days ago I checked out https://colonist.io due to it having some open positions (saw here on hn "who's hiring"), it's all AI driven, but it looks and feels awful. Perhaps that's the original catan playing experience but I for sure wouldn't want future software to be like this. Even when using AI, even looking at that, I know it's possible to do much better with AI, it's just that it won't by itself so I don't think there will be a lack of opportunities for those that are into building stuff.

It's actually amazing that an AI can guide me through a mountain of incongruent, difficult to use and understand without years of study, nerd interfaces and programming decisions others have made and allow me to try out a complete new OS (for instance microOS) and write a WebGL tile drawing engine. At the same time, it still stumbles with simple stuff, while at the same time being able to generate a JS + wasm tile game skeleton. But when you look at the skeleton it's actually not that amazing and you can see the training/stolen code leaking everywhere, things you didn't ask are there too, choices are made for things that weren't present in the specs/prompts when they weren't needed either... The upside is that it cost me $0.02. But to be decent I need to spec it properly. I need to know how and why it sucks, and how and why to make it not suck, even if when writing out a spec.

I don't have a horse in this race, I know this architecture can't lead to AGI, it could theoretically solve programming (in absolute), but it doesn't seem so either due to the nature of LLMs. What will happen is that it will be "SAP/salesforce" software for everyone. To be honest, it mostly sucks already and that's not fault of the AI models. What I guess you won't be able to do is charge enough to pay your house on a business model of switching CSS colors, or doing wordpress updates, and pretending you're some sort of wizard and that pounding sand activity is worth what you were being paid.

I think that those who want to build things will have way more leverage and reach than ever. Maybe not in a corporate environment - as the same **** that would tangle basic stuff into 2 weeks of work, instead of a single afternoon may actually be more savvy politically to keep their positions - but everywhere else it feels like it will be so.

And even in other aspects. I paid a bit more than $3k to different artists as freelancers for getting in total less than 100 images for my game ($30-$45/img), of which, prior to finding an artist that was actually willing to listen and do what I asked, was about 70% not worth even the small amount I was paying. With that artist the rate of satisfaction went up, but still not always as I had envisioned. Some of the first artists I worked with were just plain stupid to work with even though I was paying them ok (taking into account their countries). With AI, even though it's mostly built out of stolen work, with a yearly sub to any of those image gen platforms, I did in 2 months more than 2k images of which maybe 1k was usable and I was way happier with them... for about $24. I left thousands of images in credits unused for about $120/year.

There's just so many things that don't require an artist but instead adherence to a spec under a known guard-railed path. This does suck for the artist himself, it does suck for me too since my hourly rates got butchered too, but as a creator, this is all amazing - as long as we get local, free models. For the artists and programmers that were just milking it - well, you kinda prompted this, no pun intended.

on the other hand I see a problem with the people's sentiment. especially at Plattforms like reddit. I am a huge fan of all this progress. write a few apps from the scratch and thought myself even new programming languages for it. nowadays the work shifts to a higher level. making decisions about architecture and so on. ofc there's always the pitfall of letting the AI rule but if you put brain effort in it, it's so much easier to get something that already works quite well how you imagined it. however on the other hand there are all those people who haven't used it, seeing all those new software project coming out of nowhere and can't really judge how much work is behind a tool or not. people start rage bait like crazy even up to an amount that people already told me they've left reddit because of all this negativity. ofc many things are vibe coded. exactly those things which can be done quickly quite good and which the person in charge may not be the very best person. the problem is that people can't judge the architecture behind it and start calling almost everything AI slop.... sad times

Well that’s because most people work all day and come home tired. It’s tough to self actualize when you’re too tired to think.

And I don’t even know if it’s true that people have more free time. A lot of people have side hustles like Uber or whatever to make extra money.

I think you're being overly harsh. I don't match his temperament at all because my first real skillset(WoW :D) was literally looked down on by society rather than admired, so if anything the contrast was confusing to me to have a skillset that has value.

However i can't imagine if during my WoW days, overnight my role was suddenly just replaced with someone doing my role and 4 other roles highly automated, with just a general knowledge instead of an absurd depth into one role, and all my peers thought i was being lazy for not wanting to automate as well.

I'll add. I once got stopped by a bunch of JW. And I wanted to practice my Dutch, and they were willing to talk to me in Dutch.

They showed me a video about depression. And it was actually exceptionally good advice. It spoke about speaking to a therapist. There was a small bit about prayer, which was obviously not my bag. But I was pleasantly surprised at how grounded the advice was.