”Fuck it, make it anyway“ is absolutely the best advice I can give to programmers going through the crisis. Just make something that people want and you may find the joy of building again.
Fuck it, make it anyway
451–460 of 613 posts
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're projecting, No, I'm actually not. I'm an active creative portrait photographer and I take part in photographic communities with people much, much better than me, I am surrounded by dozens of gigging and working musicians, songwriters and composers in my friend group (and play a couple of instruments myself); I know painters and illustrators of great ability (though I am not that kind of artist). I listen to…
> photographer "Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it." -- The Crayon, one of the oldest art magazines. It turns out humans have been devaluing the newer ways to create art since forever. > you might as well place a grey rectangle There are so many literally {color} rectangles hanging in contemporary art mu…
This line comparing to photography is a trope, and IMO a category error.
> There are so many literally {color} rectangles hanging in contemporary art museums.
Yes but you understand I wasn’t talking about the colour, right, but the absence of value.
All generative output is grey.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
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’m sure there is some of that, people looking back at years of learning a skill, maybe even turning it into a productive career, and being upset that anyone can pay for an LLM tool and get output they believe is comparable. In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doin…
NGL, its a little annoying and disheartening that many can now partially build with an LLM tool what I spent so many years learning. It does not cover all cases, but there is an element of this.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#454Think of the classic Venn diagram, the intersection of: 1. Things I enjoy doing. 2. Things I am good at doing. 3. Things people value me doing. The problem with AI is that it potentially changes all three of those bubbles. 1. Sure, AI is powerful, but maybe I don't enjoy coding that way. 2. I'm really good at C++, but I'm not very good at prompting (at least no better than anyone else). 3. No one hires me anymore bec…
Couldn't disagree more. Here's how I look at it as a person who wrote my code by hand for 15 years. I'm the owner of my own small bootstrapped startup. 1. I've always been enjoyed delivering solutions more than the actual process of programming, and AI just helps me deliver more of that faster. And for the actual process of programming, I found a way of working with AI that makes it enjoyable. I've built my own AI ag…
Any advice on how to use or not use AI?
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
What in the world? I’ve built a thing by hand before and enjoyed the process of doing it. I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’ve also built many things with AI and enjoyed them much less. I think the reason so many people are frustrated is that they _know_ they are falling behind, they _know_ the thing that they like doing is not something they can easily get employed to do. That sucks. Do you actually believe that p…
The problem is that you're not putting as much effort into building things with AI as you were by hand. If you were, it would still be satisfying
I think this might be true, but I think it's because it's more difficult to saturate my thinking capacity when building with AI rather than just laziness (which I am reading as the implication of your comment, perhaps incorrectly).
Building with AI requires spending time on non-thinking tasks like stopping the AI from doing stupid stuff, loading context from different tasks when working on multiple things in parallel, and waiting for responses when not working on multiple things in parallel. With manual programming, though, you have a single task in front of you and are fully focused on that task. In that task, there are innumerable micro-tasks that you handle sequentially which each require some thinking: how to organize code to be readable in the future, working out the logic of a sequence of if statements, deciding on types to use, etc.
AI handles all those micro-decisions for you which yes, might free up your mind to think about higher-level problems (to the extent that you don't spend your time deslopping AI output), but also requires a very different style of thinking that is at least for me, much less natural and much less enjoyable.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#456Think of the classic Venn diagram, the intersection of: 1. Things I enjoy doing. 2. Things I am good at doing. 3. Things people value me doing. The problem with AI is that it potentially changes all three of those bubbles. 1. Sure, AI is powerful, but maybe I don't enjoy coding that way. 2. I'm really good at C++, but I'm not very good at prompting (at least no better than anyone else). 3. No one hires me anymore bec…
> No one hires me anymore because AI can do my job cheaper. As someone who thinks AI is an incredible tool, I think your job is safe. Are there incompetent companies that are replacing people with AI? Yup... But also, I'm pretty sure most people don't want to work at companies with such poor management anyway? So in a way, I think AI is prefiltering incompetent management for us. On you other two points: I kinda feel…
I miss the emotional and problem-solving nature of software development. I am reading classic literature and feel good about it after long hours watching AI generated content. Knowing a person chose every word changes how it feels to read.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
"But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared." I think you (and almost everyone in this thread) are missing an important point here: even without relying on external input on our work, we feel less proud of the work we produce by hand when we know we could have prom…
Then why wouldn't you build it with AI?
Because for many people, building stuff with AI isn't enjoyable
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> books .. communicate something
> convince or to inform. It's literally the pretext for all communication
ok, so what does a dirty novel, or some other pulp fiction convince or inform you of?
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's an element of truth to what you're saying in respect to the feelings of frustration that people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade. What I also think they are thinking (because I am one of them) is not that we can produce value easier and quicker. It's that there's a devaluing of education and expertise to the po…
> people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade. I say this often, but in 25 years I have not worked with non-technical people who can design a complete, logical product, even with AI/LLMs "unlocking" the coding part now. Maybe I'm just unlucky but quite a few companies and different domains.
The non-technical people can learn (or can be forced to learn to keep their jobs) and enough will succeed to devastate programmer employment.
Re: Fuck it, make it anyway
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I could get paid a Bay Area software engineering salary to clean the bathroom instead, I think I would actually prefer to clean the bathroom. Software engineering requires me to actually use a large part of my mind. Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, would leave my mind largely free to think whatever I feel like. The physical movement is probably better for the body, too.
Huh, I like using my mind. The thing I despise about AI in software engineering is that it is much more difficult to engage my mind consistently and fully.
Most of us like to use our mind. Just some prefer not to on a boring and dull senseless corporate solutions. If they can.