No. Honestly AI drives me to nerd out and tinker even more just to spite the homogenization and dehumanization of it all. If we're entering a world in which doing anything but blindly consuming whatever pablum the machine feeds us is seen as foolish then I guess I'll be a fool.
Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?
31–37 of 37 posts
Re: Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?
#32I've always had more projects than I do time. And it's easy for me to be selective about where I might use an LLM. So no changes here.
Re: Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?
#33People will go "no, I nerd out and tinker more than ever" where by "nerd out and tinker", and what they mean is "I prompt the AI, and it does the tinkering for me". I say the question isn't if you use AI to build you something, but if you nerd out and tinker yourself.
AI is just another tool to nerd out and tinker with. The question was "Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker".
If you're using AI (to wit: another tool) to nerd out and tinker, then you're obviously not losing that motivation.
So my genuine answer to the original question is: No, I nerd out and tinker more than ever.
Right now, I am using AI as a tool to do stuff I otherwise wouldn't do, like reverse engineer a Whoop band for use with Apple Health sans a Whoop subscription.
Re: Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?
#34So,
After 1 year of computational ph.d., I really pushed a lot the AI models.
But honesty, also if they can be really good, I think that it does not really speedup a lot in long term a junior. You cannot really present non-validated results, and the validation of the huge amount of unorganized things that they generate is really stressing.
So yes, for a while I was losing motivation, because I felt like I had to produce more but I could really follow that productivity.
To really get motivation, u need to spend the correct amount of time of understand and make your hand dirty when it is necessary. I noticed that if I try before by myself, I understand what I am doing, and after I just optimize the code using an LMM, it is way more motivating
Re: Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?
#35People will go "no, I nerd out and tinker more than ever" where by "nerd out and tinker", and what they mean is "I prompt the AI, and it does the tinkering for me". I say the question isn't if you use AI to build you something, but if you nerd out and tinker yourself.
I'd further say it's not a TRUE Scottish tinkering unless you're hand writing machine code yourself and feeding it via punch cards.
But what if I use AI to write live demos where you can write machine code, debug it visually in your browser, punch data on virtual punch cards? What if I used AI to generate videos about this, generate the artwork, backgrounds, narration, intro music, etc. I guess I am just a meta-tinkerer :-)
Re: Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?
#36Absolutely not. I have way more hard problems that engage me then ever. I do both human and AI coding. The former more to learn and mold my mind around a problem. The latter when I feel I am ready to delegate to a junior dev. I think of AI coding like how I’ve operated as a principal engineer at a company. It works well when you study the problem well enough to know precisely what you want. That often requires actual…
Using agents to micromanage agents is something I ended up doing.
Part of the fun is solving puzzles where the coding agent gets stuck and me then giving it technical direction. Especially when an agent says that something cannot be done in software (I show them how it actually can be done).
I am in the more motivated than ever camp.
Re: Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?
#37I'm tinkering much more because I have an easy way to enter into a new domain and apply what I know to that domain. I can also get unstuck a bit more quickly as I go deeper. Before it was reading textbooks, this turned into searching the web, now I have a minion who can go write me a summary. Is the minion perfect? No, but more often it is.
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