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Fuck it, make it anyway

joelotter.com

11–20 of 613 posts

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#11
Hobby stuff- I found slowing down works best. Just enjoy spending time in the evening picking the colors for my little project that will never ship. Genuinely relaxing, had some random boomer sitcom as background noise.

Work - max adhd no brakes cat stand dog stand satellites.

Honestly loving software engineering right now. The age of magic incantations and magic meat is over. I’m the wizard now. We all are.

And it’s awesome.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#12

Long before generative AI we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution. YC marched to the drum. Execution! Execution! Execution! Do things that don’t scale, do the hard things, build something people want. And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, progra…

> we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution

This was never true, otherwise "stealth startups" wouldn't have been a thing.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#13

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longe…

One of the big points of art is expressing something to other people. Tired of this sort of shallow dismissal where wanting recognition, or for your art to reach people is cast as a kind of vanity that real artists ought to get over.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#14

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longe…

There is an old saying in creative fields, long before AI: you can make art, or you can make money. It's rare that you can combine the two.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#15

> Through chatting to Shad I came to realise there are only really three paths open to me. I can start using generative AI to feel like I’m “keeping up” or “competing”, but then I won’t enjoy the work. I could stop making things entirely, but as any creative person will know that’s never really an option. Or, I can keep making things the way I enjoy, keep learning, keep doing it the hard way, for no real concrete rea…

I see your point but I'm not sure there is much more to say on the matter: apart from having fun, learning stuff and taking pride in your work, what other reasons do you see for "doing things the hard way"? You could argue that it makes you more competitive because you'll be better at babysitting a coding agent, but this feels less and less true with every new model. Unless you're seeing something else to take into account here?

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#16

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longe…

Very skilled assembly programmers still can beat compilers, but nearly no assembly is written by humans anymore.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#17
I spend so much more time with generative IA thinking and iterating over design details (or even overall design) than before, when part was consumed by writing the implementation. Bots are often terrible and/or don’t have all your requirements available on this subject, or even your are discovering them along the way and you don’t all the time want the recommendation of the machine.

From my experience not iterating enough and leaving high level decision to generative IA yield shit. Maybe this is not the case in all projects. But in my work, it would be absurd to complain about not having to know random API details anymore, unless when they actually matter.

The thing is that I’ve been programming for more than 30 years. Maybe I would have another opinion if I was still learning the things I was learning 20 years ago.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#18
post #9

I liked building apps and helpful tools before AI came around. I've been doing so for 15 years, 10 of them professionally. Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun. What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want. I stopped reviewing the code at all. People on here are often saying how that's…

Me too I use my apps every day. But the main thing coming out of this is that they are tailored to me. Turning hobbies into hustles is one of the worse things that happened in the post social media days.

I think selling software that solves your own problems is great and beats trying to develop for customers you do not understand.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#19

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longe…

Someone once told me

"Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book."

People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI.

There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete".

But that was the reality before, with the stream of criticism directed at people writing game engines, of doing new programming languages, new web frameworks, or anything new really.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#20

Long before generative AI we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution. YC marched to the drum. Execution! Execution! Execution! Do things that don’t scale, do the hard things, build something people want. And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, progra…

> Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100

But my purse does, as do my investors. I can no longer justify taking a hundred hours to build a product, even if that makes it materially better than that of my competitor, who spent one hour to build theirs and used the other ninety-nine to sell it.

I don't like that either, but it's the reality we live in now.

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