The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

AI tools have put friction where it should be - by eliminating incidental friction. By incidental friction I mean, things that were really not ambiguous, but were made so due to lack of access to resources.

As an example, if i needed to navigate, I used a paper map. There was friction in pulling out a map, planning a route etc. This took time. With digital mapping apps this sort of incidental friction is not there.

Real friction is inherent ambiguity. For example, what product does the market need ? By eliminating incidental friction, AI allows us to focus on the smallest hard-problem where there is real-friction.

Yeah, it does make me wonder though - have these AI boosters never written their own tools before? I've written, for my own personal use, literally thousands of tiny little bash scripts, vim scripts, emacs scripts, Python programs, C programs, etc. I still daily use a music player (wish wrapper around mpg123) that I did in 2001[1]!

And yet, I'd be the first to admit that, for each 1000 things I wrote, probably 1 got permanent use for a significant length of time; the value, over time, to me was the lessons learned.

Now people are going through that cycle faster (i.e. instead of doing 5000 persona-use programs over 30 years, they're doing it in a single year), but the end result is still going to be the same - no one is ever gonna use it, including themselves!

It comes with an additional downside - you don't actually learn anything by having the AI generate your programs for you.

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[1] In case anyone is interested why I wanted a wrapper - it uses the locatedb so that I don't have to search for my mp3s:

    #!/usr/bin/wish
    # Copyright Lelanthran K. Manickum 2002, provided under BSD license
    #

    set version "1.0"

    proc playSong {songname} {
       set rc [catch { exec killall -9 mpg123 }]
       if {$songname=="\[Stop Playback]"} {
          .midFrame.lblPlaying configure -text "Stopped"
          return 0;
       }
       set rc [catch { exec mpg123 --loop -1 "$songname" & }]
       if {$rc==0} {
          .midFrame.lblPlaying configure -text "Playing: $songname"
       }
    }

    proc locateSongs {pattern} {
       .lstResults delete 0 999999999
       set tmpvar [split [exec locate -i "*$pattern*.mp3"] "\n"]
       .lstResults insert 0 "\[Stop Playback]"
       foreach title $tmpvar {
          .lstResults insert 1 $title
       }
    }

    frame .topFrame 
    frame .midFrame

    entry .topFrame.entSearchString -text "Search String"
    button .topFrame.btnSearch -text "Search" -command {locateSongs [.topFrame.entSearchString get]}
    listbox .lstResults -yscrollcommand {.sby set} -xscrollcommand {.sbx set}
    scrollbar .sby -orien vert -command {.lstResults yview}
    scrollbar .sbx -orien horiz -command {.lstResults xview}
    label .midFrame.lblPlaying -text "Stopped"

    locateSongs ""
    focus .topFrame.entSearchString

    bind .topFrame.entSearchString  ".topFrame.btnSearch invoke"
    bind .lstResults  {playSong [.lstResults get active]}
    bind .lstResults  {playSong [.lstResults get active]}


    grid .topFrame -row 0 -column 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .topFrame.entSearchString -column 0 -row 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .topFrame.btnSearch -column 1 -row 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .midFrame -column 0 -row 1 -sticky nsew
    grid .midFrame.lblPlaying -column 0 -row 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .lstResults -column 0 -row 2 -sticky nsew 
    grid .sby -column 1 -row 2 -sticky nsew 
    grid .sbx -column 0 -row 3 -sticky nsew 

    grid rowconfigure .topFrame 0 -weight 1
    grid columnconfigure .topFrame 0 -weight 1
    grid rowconfigure . 2 -weight 2
    grid columnconfigure . 0 -weight 2

    wm protocol . WM_DELETE_WINDOW {
        set rc [catch { exec killall -9 mpg123 } ]
        destroy .
    }

    wm title . "Simple Music Player - v$version"
    wm geometry . 700x500

The fact that you consider deterministic output from a compiler the same as probabilistic output from a LLM makes me think you don't know how either of those things work, even at a very superficial level.

https://imgur.com/gallery/google-ai-sota-llDaUDr