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It's just the start, it's about to steal the joy of everything in life pretty soon.
It's just the start, it's about to steal the joy of everything in life pretty soon.
There's something very "late stage capitalism" about pouring torrents of capital into tools that can replace human ingenuity, artistry and creativity while starving stuff like infrastructure, space travel, etc.
I don't agree. Copilot/etc is kind of worthless for me, it creates so many issues that I've never bothered to work with it. AI is awesome for solving issues, asking it questions about code, asking for possible solutions. But maybe I'm just fast at writing code that actually solves the problem, so I don't need an AI to code for me.
When you program for a hobby, you oftentimes seek to enjoy the route as much or more than reaching the destination. Copilot would be a distraction and an annoyance in this case - unless you're genuinely stuck and then you can use Copilot as a mentor.
It all depends on your context and what you're trying to do.
I've been using Cursor extensively these past few months, for anything ranging from scaffolding to complex UIs. The trick, I've found, is to treat the AI like I would work with a junior engineer, giving in concrete detailed tasks to accomplish, breaking the problem down myself into manageable chunks. Here are two examples of little word games I've made, each of them took all in all a couple of days to ideate, design and build.
https://7x7.game You're given a grid and you need to make as many words as possible, you can only use the letters in the bottom row. There's complex state management, undo, persistent stats, light/dark modes, animations. About 80-90% of the code was generated and then manually tweaked/refactored.
https://vwls.game Given 4 consonants, you have to generate as many words as possible. This is heavily inspired by Spelling Bee, but with a slightly different game mechanic. One of the challenges was that not all "valid" words are fun, there are a lot of obscure/technical/obsolete words in the dictionary, I used Claude's batch API to filter down the dictionary to words that are commonly known. I then used cursor to generate the code for the UI, with some manual refactoring.
In both cases, having the AI generate the code enabled me to focus on designing the games, both visually and from an interaction perspective. I also chose to manually code some parts myself, because these were fun.
At the end of the day, tools are tools, you can use them however you like, you just need to figure out how they fit in your workflow.
My experience is that like so much else there's an expiry date on the joyful coding.
I gave it another chance with AI but AI is too incompetent, it's more of a creative intern that does badly speed reports than a competent replacement for painstakingly reading documentations and googling.
It's just the start, it's about to steal the joy of everything in life pretty soon.
That’s just because people have been so indoctrinated by capitalism that they only find joy if they’re being worked to the bone. They have forgotten the joy of not doing anything productive.
It's just the start, it's about to steal the joy of everything in life pretty soon.
That’s just because people have been so indoctrinated by capitalism that they only find joy if they’re being worked to the bone. They have forgotten the joy of not doing anything productive.
Why practice writing if generative ML can create a poem or short story for you?
In that regard you're best off just sitting down in front of a screen and consuming content generated by ML.
And from the example in the original blog post the author had the generative ML do the fun stuff in solving the problem and all they did was drudge work cleaning it up and submitting it. Very productive from the company perspective but reminds me a lot of low thought factory processes.