Fuck it, make it anyway

Not to derail the conversation, but the concept of money itself is on loose screws. One might argue that compute and energy (dare I say expressed in BTC?) is arguably the (world reserve) currency of the future. The current system discounts the value of the hours of the artist based on where that artist was born, rather than on merit, and is the source of a lot of problems including trade wars, extreme globalization, offshoring, mercantilism and the entire industrial stripping of developed nations by those who purposely keep their currencies low and exploit their own population.

I like the codegen = power tools analogy to writing software.

I didn't go to school for CS or adjacent: I went to art school 20 years ago for 'new media' which feels like a _silly_ thing to have on a diploma in 2026.

My career started in high school and ran this way: print design w/ computer geekery on the side -> classes in all sorts of digital media production methods -> web design -> web development -> full-stack development w/ a UI/UX focus -> engineering manager ? -> engineering director ??

Then Claude comes crashing in a couple years ago and suddenly code I would grid on to get right got easier and easier to ship. I have enough _experience_ to know not to trust it, put in the appropriate guardrails, and now we can deliver work at a velocity that makes more people happy and keeps my team grounded in a reliable 40hr workweek.

Back to power tools: I'm done going to READMEs and docs and learning the order of operations to build with a hammer and nails. Turns out I didn't really _love coding_. The Job To Be Done was to build the app/feature in a way that satisfies business and user requirements, can be reliably maintained over time, and is securely integrated with existing systems. The tools are now fully-automatic instead of semi-automated with IDEs and linters. Turns out I just like delivering product that solves business objectives (working on turning that into a bigger thing).

I'm still functionally the Responsible Party that gets in trouble if things break down, and its been a couple years of codegen entering our repos and things haven't broken down.

I'm using the lightness of mind the above now provides to find space for the things that strike me creatively, like I did when I was younger and more into art and music. I'd rather spend that creative juice elsewhere, not coding.

So I'm sorry to the coders who love the craft and feel like the industry is slipping from them. Like many industries that have started as craft, code has officially entered its mechanization phase. It requires less finish carpenters who know how to work a coping saw and more general contractors with the latest 18v line of tools.

There's a bigger audience of businesses and consumers that want solutions built quickly, reliably, from a trusted party with experience than there is for tailored code.

I don't mean for this to be discouraging. I really like photos OP took in this piece, and that NoAi camera app looks really great! I'm sorry there's no profitable market for it, but I'm glad it exists! I feel like the skills that created that app belong at an Adobe or an Apple working on creative tools where they can afford to hire someone to work on just single feature or idea.

I wish there was more opportunity for everyone to do work that brings them good brain tingles makes you feel the most human you can be. "Fuck it, make it anyway" is exactly the right attitude rn if you can afford to do it.

  Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments?

I'm sorry... I'm trying to be respectful, but I find this comment highly combative and disrespectful beneath a professional veneer. Implying that the opposition --people who also use deep neural networks to make games instead of just using the huge set of tools that no one human could ever understand in full but aren't usually called "AI" anymore-- is lacking in intrinsic value, deep thinking, or soul is typical, but the accusation that they're just bad-faith jerks who only care about being complimented is new and frankly absurd.

  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?

I think it should be obvious in hindsight that this is a false dichotomy, to say the very least.

  Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life?

This part is also leaning hard on vague terms, on top of being another false dichotomy. Do I enjoy typing? Not particularly, tho vim is fun. Do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of "I would still love to make software even if I never got to run it"? Probably not, but who does? And finally, do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of engineering software? Yes of course, but isn't engineering intrinsically tied to specifications and their verification, AKA "the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life"?

  it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.

This exact same argument applies to writing in assembly; just like in that historical case, the rebuttal is to point out how fleeting this situation is.

That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering?

*TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.

Of course. Auto-vectorization isn't magic, for one. In any video codec, the hot kernels will all be in hand-written assembly.

Now I'm not saying AI can't write ASM. I'm saying that compilers have a hard job. They output bad assembly, because the task is difficult.

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