In this thread: people who automate jobs away lament their jobs being automated away
Fuck it, make it anyway
71–80 of 613 posts
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#72In 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…
This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things.
The feeling I get is that they haven't earned it, that they've not put in the years to learn it and now they get to make things. I spent 25 years programming, from 2000-2025. I always thought that the number would keep going up, one day I'd say three decades, four decades, but I've stopped counting. I don't program anymore.
I started using GitHub Copilot in the beta in 2021 ish, where we turned comments into lines of code, then functions, was there the night ChatGPT dropped as a free preview in 22, trialed cursor on its first release, all the way up to now using both ChatGPT & Claude CLI & apps daily. My slowing down of writing code happened gradually, but from copilot I was hooked, I could do more, quicker. And now, I don't write any code, I just build the systems around agents & processes.
I'm okay with that because my thought has always been that we bring value. If we don't have to write a single line of code to bring an org value, we're doing a great job. And now that's almost true.
The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.
In a way, I think you're right, was it always just about the power & compliments for some people? The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians? And has AI broken that stranglehold?
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they? It might have been true month ago, not sure right now.
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.
I find it hard to believe that the output of modern compilers is objectively 'bad assembly'.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very skilled assembly programmers still can beat compilers, but nearly no assembly is written by humans anymore.
I'm too young to have known the assembly wizard world, but how is the job market for people of that skill-set and expertise? My assumption was that being closer to hardware tends to be more resistant to AI hype since they work in environments where just vibe coding some slop carries much higher risk than vibe coding a webpage or mobile app does.
If one works in AI it's quite lucrative because shaving off a couple percent is worth the big bucks. But increasingly, there is enough training data for LLMs to do the same thing because the number of unique computations is fairly small.
As part of learning how to work with coding agents, I had them code up a bunch of games that had been in my head for years. They were never going to see the light of day otherwise because I have too much on my plate, but it was fun to make them come to life. I didn't do it for money and it's not my day job nor will it ever be but it was educational in learning the limits of Codex and Claude.
But the app stores have been hosed for years ever since the Zynga playbook and DLC. And on Android, if you release something honest and original without those things, it will just get copied and re-released filled with malware. So why bother?
I don't really miss the old days because despite all the nostalgia, engineers were really underpaid relative to equally difficult professions and they usually got terrible shares of equity compared to the C-suite. And has everyone forgotten EA spouse?
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#75In 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.
Yeah, I wanted to say that too. You can't (always) separate enjoying the craft from enjoying the praise. People too often talk about the value of an art object divorced from its provenance, as if you could measure its goodness with a meter, instead of the value of the audience relating to the personality expressed in it, which means it's a communication, and the communication isn't all one-way. When you're crafting something you're initiating that communication. Of course you want praise, or distressed complaints or anyway some reaction.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#76In 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…
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 lackin…
Sorry if it came off as combative. The points I made are not mutually exclusive but they are in some cases. There is a difference between someone that chose computer science because Silicon Valley was the next Wallstreet, or someone who has been tinkering out of sheer curiosity since elementary school.
I am convinced that AI will be the tool that creates abundance, but that doesn’t mean human engineering is automatically irrelevant either. AI has already surpassed what humans were able to do, for instance solving certain math problems. My point was mainly that engineers are forced to introspect, and that includes questions about identity, what it means to be human, and the motivations behind their work/hobby.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#77In 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…
The first paragraph kind of reads like an inverse of Kant's criteria for a moral action: are you sure that there was no enjoyment, no pleasure was involved in this action or resulted from it? At the same time, it kind of establishes the ethics of self-entertainment, and by this, maybe, an imperative of joyless joy? It kind of echos 19th century 'accomplishment', a modest self-entertainment by the fruits of virtuos learning and training, while with kind of a consumerist twist, as this now involves the use and "modest" development of technology, which introduces an external, social dependency, which it at the same time tries to eclipse.
Meaning, I think, besides utilitarian one-time, one-purpose scripts, programming is essentially an at least potentially social activity, there's always a potential social horizon to it. Just like with any other activity that aims at a work.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the article?
Yes, I read the 5-7 paragraph article :). I'm not sure what part of it you could possibly consider a rebuttal...? It's just talking about one devs decision to keep working on their purist software despite their anxiety; basically no broader points are made at all, and certainly none are made with any sort of rigor. It didn't seem like that was his goal.
The author specifically mentions the compliments on helpful scripts and tools help them feel fulfilled.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#79In 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 str…
This is interesting because it mixes the process with the reward in an inverse way to what I see from AI pro/con. Those who like writing code have seemed to me to lose out in status from the introduction of AI, while those such as myself who care little for status have used AI more and gained from it.
Conversely, those who like writing aren't always about the reward (being an author, having a book published) but those who would like to have written a book regardless of the writing, often are.
Interesting mix.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#80Since I am currently using AI to make a game engine, I feel like I am sort of qualified to say something on the topic, and I don’t think it’s really true that AI’s can just roll one out without a lot of poking. They constantly go off on the wrong track and I have no faith that they’d get anywhere sensible without a human steering the whole thing (for now anyway). But even if they could the best thing they’re ever goi…
Yep. AI can probably make your marketing website or REST service on autopilot. Or even small minigame experiences.
But go outside the bounds of median programming and AI becomes increasingly scatterbrained. It requires a lot of guidance to successfully build high performance, novel software. I still find it more productive though - I can work on three tasks simultaneously with AI, and only one if I’m manually working on a single algorithm. It’s very much like running a team of well-read junior developers.