Stop Slopware

you'll understand the first time you lose half an hour evaluating a library that has all the old signs of competent design and even the trivial examples don't work and you realize the project was generated and you've had your time completely wasted

I think that's very important.

Never mind six months; with AI, "you" can "build" something small and useful that works in six minutes. But "you" almost certainly didn't learn anything, and I think it's quite questionable if "you" "built" something.

I have found AI to be a great tool for learning, but I see it -- me, personally -- as a very slippery slope into not learning at all. It is so easy, so trivial, to produce a (seemingly accurate) answer to just about any question whatsoever, no matter how mundane or obscure, that I can really barely engage my own thinking at all.

On one hand, with the goal of obtaining an answer to a question quickly, it's awesome.

On the other hand, I feel like I have learned almost nothing at all. I got precisely, pinpointed down, the exact answer to the question I asked. Going through more traditional means of learning -- looking things up in books, searching web sites, reading tutorials, etc. -- I end up with my answer, but I also end up with more context, and a deeper+broader understanding of the overall problem space.

Can I get that with AI? You bet. And probably even better, in some respects. But I have to deliberately choose to. It's way too easy to just grab the exact answer I wanted and be on my way.

I feel like that is both good and bad. I don't want to be too dismissive of the good, but I also feel like it would be unwise to ignore the bad.

Whoa hey though, isn't this just exactly like books? Didn't, like, Plato and all them Greek cats centuries ago say that writing things down would ruin our brains, and what I'm claiming here is 100% the same thing? I don't think so. I see it as a matter of scale. It's a similar effect -- you probably do lose something (whether if it's valuable or not is debatable) when you choose to rely on written words rather than memorize. But it's tiny. With our modern AI tools, there is potential to lose out on much more. You can -- you don't have to, but you can -- do way more coasting, mentally. You can pretty much coast nonstop now.

How dare some nobody in a third world country use AI resources to accelerate the development of some process that fixes an issue for them and occasionally ask you to buy them a coffee when a poor sad pathetic evil worthless hateful disgusting miserable useless 5 trillion dollar company that actively hates you does the same thing with worse results that makes your life more miserable while lining their pockets with every penny in the entire world?!