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Fuck it, make it anyway

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Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#361

Post by andrewflnr »

imdsm wrote: post #72
MachineMan wrote: post #10

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…

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…

I was already pretty clear that the job of producing value was separate from the part of the job that I enjoyed. What makes me sad is the part that I enjoyed evaporating entirely.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#362

Post by fsloth »

This is a bit strange article.

If you enjoy doing a thing in specific way, nobody is going to take that away.

Chess is a great example. More players than ever, perfectly obsolete if you compare yourself to a computer, but that does not hurt.

If the AI takes your livelihood - that hurts. But I did not read this to be a complaint on that.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#363

Post by acedTrex »

This resonated with me incredibly heavily. I will say one thing, i've adopted LLM tools fairly heavily for various things. But im doing so on my terms and strictly using them in a way that to me enhances my rigorous understanding of a given system.

Its not QUITE the same thing but its a close enough approximation that i can enjoy the fruits of the output as if it were my own. Just my own 2cents on my personal struggle

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#364

Post by acedTrex »

MachineMan wrote: post #10

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…

> I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch

I appreciate this statement, it really hammers home some of the differences ive been feeling from the analogy. You put it in words better.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#365

Post by djha-skin »

I started a Janet project [1] with the express purpose of doing everything manually for fun, but I ended up using the agent for a lot of stuff pretty quickly anyway. Functions I wanted to be part of the library as a matter of completion, but that were not fun to write. Docs as well. Stuff I probably wouldn't have written in the first place if AI didn't exist.

It reinforced in my head this idea that hobby programming is entering its "sports" or "running" era.

Consider the modern jogging enthusiast. They buy Nike shoes that make it really easy to run long distances, specialized clothing, fancy water bottles. They find spots to drive to and park at before getting out and running downhill for a few miles, getting picked up at the bottom by one of their friends. Stuff that makes for a great social media post.

They do the hard part of running, but curated to just the parts that they enjoy. They drive the rest of the time and when they do run, it looks nothing like the first marathon run of ancient Greece.

It sounds nice and all to talk about "I'm going to code anyway," but when I did this I found that there are always parts of the coding that I really really never did want to do and that I'm happy to just outsource to my agent like the jogger outsources getting to the top with their car. Testing, writing docs, making the readme logo. Stuff that probably wouldn't have happened without the AI but that I'm glad exists.

1: https://GitHub.com/djha-skin/janver

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#366

Post by pessimizer »

whstl wrote: post #19
MachineMan wrote: post #10

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 str…

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

Other people think that books are a communication tool that you use in order to communicate something, and that something is the thing that is actually important. They may suffer from writing a book, and be embarrassed that they've written a book.

Enjoying the process is fine. It's a hobby, however, not a form of nobility, and enjoying it doesn't mean you're not terrible at it. If you think the book is the goal, you're lying to yourself. There are plenty of books, they're easy to get. If your goal is the reward that you receive from other people for the books itself i.e. if your goal is to create a valuable commodity, that's fine, too.

But a goal in writing books could be to convince or to inform. It's literally the pretext for all communication.

I always find it harrowing that having the goal when programming be to create a system that could enable people to accomplish some function, or could accomplish some function for people autonomously seems to be the farthest from people's mind. But it's literally the pretext. You have to be trying to do that or lying about trying to do that to even program at all. Making it a battle between whether the program that you're writing is a product/resume item or a fidget spinner abstracts away reality for a contest between ruthless capitalism and middle-class self-actualization. Greed and narcissism.

If you actually want to accomplish something in the world (other than burnishing your self-image), AI is just a tool, not a threat to your identity.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#367

Post by 1dom »

MachineMan wrote: post #10

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…

> PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.

I appreciated this, but I feel the crux of the issue is this is only true with painful caveats. If you're a "computer carpenter" (massive nerd), that massive nerdiness was almost like a scarce asset in the professional world that appeared only after a life involving thousands of solitary hours from a young age in front of a computer screen.

That asset has been somewhat synthesized now. The asset of being able to quickly understand and produce a solution appropriate for a large technical system is now _significantly_ less scarce for businesses.

Sure, we still have our intrinsic value, but that's going to get increasingly less fun to convert into the sort of value necessary to pay bills.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#368

Post by groundzeros2015 »

user43928 wrote: post #4

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…

I find that it falls apart after the first 1000 or so lines.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#369

Post by acedTrex »

59percentmore wrote: post #342
Fraterkes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And why can't that apply to people who use generative AI? Expression isn't about seeking recognition, in the sense of clout or popularity, it's simply a matter of " I want other people to be able to see what I see. " If I compare what I'm able to produce by hand, and what I'm able to get the computer to spit out, it's pretty clear to me which is closest to what's in my head. So why do I have to be ashamed of that?

> And why can't that apply to people who use generative AI?

Because they did not do anything? Theres nothing to celebrate, no skill to honor, no sweat and tears to salute. It just exists

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#370

Post by andrewflnr »

regenschutz wrote: post #355
abstractcontrol wrote: post #349

If I were an artist, I wouldn't really care that a machine took over the role of drawing lines on paper, and as a programmer, I don't care that the machines are taking the role of writing code. The thing that actually matters is understanding the problem domain, and thinking about and visualizing the program I am trying to make, so I am happy to be doing less drudge work so I can focus on what really matters. I've be…

>LLMs aren't even AI, […] I am very curious to know what you classify as AI then. Do you mean that LLMs aren't artificial? Or aren't intelligent?

Just another person who thinks AI===AGI.
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