Fuck it, make it anyway

I'm building an app to help me manage my Toastmasters clubs. I'm using AI to do it because I honestly dont care how it's made, I'm the only user right now. I just want it to work.

Thus far AI has allowed me to generate power points for meetings, pdf generation for agendas, smart role assignments, CMS for reaching out to guests to join, speech tracking, and a lot of other neat stuff.

Could I have done it without AI? Probably, but again its a hobby. It would have taken me a lot more time and effort to design and figure this out.

Someone else could have built something like this (with or without AI), and indeed many similar products exist, but theyre either paid solutions or just dont work the way I want it to.

I showed this to a few other Toastmasters and they would want to use it for their own clubs.

The way i see it, software is just a means to an end. I have over a decade of Toastmasters experience and have been involved in many clubs so I think my intrinsic knowledge and experience IS my value, not the software. If anything, AI helped me unleash more of my value to Toastmasters as a provider of a tool, rather than as my career as a software engineer.

> You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance.

I think we like to think of ourselves like this a lot, and perhaps with infinite money and time we could often approach these lofty goals. But we are also the same industry who loudly shouts from the rooftops how untrustworthy software is when someone suggests electronic voting systems. We are the same industry that has put such masterpieces into the world as Windows ME or GIMP. We're the same industry that consistently allows data breaches and SQL injection attacks. We're the same industry that has monthly NPM supply chain attacks. We advocate people use open source operating systems that still can't reliably use bluetooth, power saving modes or audio devices and then point to the "no warranty" sticker we slapped on the license, and shrug our shoulders.

We aspire to be the bricklayer you describe, but our industry as a whole bears a lot more resemblance to the Brick-Yeeter 9000 than it does to the aspirational bricklayer.

The idea has been to get the nerds out of computing since 1971.

Milt Bryce and his son Tim were pretty much the inventors of modern information-systems management[0]. And they were open in their hatred of and contempt for programmers and how they worked. Their methodology, PRIDE, was centered around giving the programmers as little to do and as little autonomy and leverage over the organization as possible, because information systems is a business function and not a technical one. The key decisions would be made by systems analysts and designers, not programmers. Without AI, the part that programmers contributed in a PRIDE project was about 15%; with AI, it asymptotically approaches zero. I've been studying PRIDE a lot over the past few years, because with Tim Bryce's death it's at risk of being forgotten; and because now with AI in the mix, it helps me understand what's actually going on from a business perspective.

This is what management has wanted all along. Programmers are expensive, tetchy, and they resist standardization and discipline, preferring instead to employ their own little bespoke methods and tool choices. (Hello, vim vs. emacs!) Failure to keep them in tight rein can spell doom for the company, as they can use their technical skills to their advantage, potentially holding the whole business hostage. You may bristle and think the above is not true, but your boss or skip-level manager probably thinks it's true, and the C suite absolutely does (especially in traditional businesses: banking, insurance, manufacturing, etc.). Nerds were seen as a necessary liability to automating a business's information systems; now, they are no longer necessary.

The only way out for us is to follow Rogue's mom's advice: "Have you tried not being a nerd?" Learn business, learn what customers actually want and what business operations need in order to fulfill those wants. Think like a systems analyst—big picture, focused on information flows between companies, departments, people, not like a programmer (detailist obsessed with the machine in PRIDE ideology).

[0] Maybe Margaret Hamilton predated them, but not by much.

> there has never been a technology that has the potential to disrupt the workforce at this scale.

Traditionally, 95%+ of the population were farmers.

The disruption we've already had is many, many times larger than anything forecast today.

>The only way out for us is to follow Rogue's mom's advice: "Have you tried not being a nerd?"

Tried and failed for decades, yes. Turns out caring for your craft makes you a nerd. Turn out what people want is to stay in their lane and simply want "the fries in the bag", with no curiosity on what's in the fries or bag as long as it tastes good.

I refuse to stop caring in this otherwise uncaring world. Now what?

>You may bristle and think the above is not true, but your boss or skip-level manager probably thinks it's true, and the C suite absolutely does

It is true. What this ultiamtely breaks down to is simple: Nerds are thinkers, and thinkers question. The context here is in tech and automation, but that's a trend that extends to a lot of systems and societies. Those in power hate the thinkers, they hate the questions. They will suppress it for as long as possible.

Use this lens in other kinds of communities and you see the pattern pops up everytime. To "stop being a nerd" in this context is akin to saying "stop questioning the system and exploit it like the rest of us".