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Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#71

Post by grebc »

jonas21 wrote: post #26
grebc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools. I think the more apt comparison would be a carpenter to a mass produced factory. If you've read any of Yegge's recent ramblings than factories of factories seem to be what the AI focused pe…

> I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools. I suspect there's some survivorship bias at play here. You don't hear what the tradesmen who shied away from using powertools thought because they ceased to find work as tradesmen. In the…

He also made the most beautiful hand crafted woodwork I’ve seen.

I dunno, I feel my comparison is more apt. AI tries to anything & everything. A powered drill just drills, and saves your arm/wrist from a manual drill.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#72

Post by grebc »

Sean-Der wrote: post #15
grebc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools. I think the more apt comparison would be a carpenter to a mass produced factory. If you've read any of Yegge's recent ramblings than factories of factories seem to be what the AI focused pe…

Here is another thing I find frustrating, but I don't know the right way to express it. A lot of this AI tooling/coding seems self-indulgent? 'I built a better software factory!'. The tools are very powerful, but I don't see the results yet. The frustration outweighs results. I am underwater dealing with it. I am getting outlandish PRs against Pion. So I spend my time triaging and feel burned out. The 'AI future' I w…

I only maintain my own codebases, so my deepest commiserations my fellow.

I’d imagine I’d just want to turn repo’s private or gate who has access, that’s my default response.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#73

Post by cassianoleal »

voakbasda wrote: post #29
suprjami wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't forget you are under no obligation to triage all the awful things. You are well within your rights to require submitters reach a certain standard before you will review their request. Your time is finite and precious. Your project benefits from your enthusiasm and knowledge. It does not benefit from you acting as human reviewer of a tsunami of low quality content. You are allowed to be ruthlessly protect…

This begs an importent question: how? How do you filter without putting up barriers that high quality contributors will not want to climb? I ask both as a maintainer who has been overwhelmed and as someone who declines to participate in communities where the bar is set too high for casual drive-by contributions.

Make it a rule that any PR that changes over ... 100 LoC? 150? needs to be broken down into smaller, more atomic ones.

If that can't be done, e.g. because it's a very large refactor that can only be published as a unit, get them to walk you through each design and architectural choice.

I don't think a high quality contributor will take issue with that.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#74

Post by orwin »

Sean-Der wrote: post #3

I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents. I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?

Powertools are new language features. AI is more of an Ikea factory. No self respecting carpenter wish to work there, but some have to

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#76

Post by mstaoru »

It is very difficult.

I consider myself reasonably skilled in AI usage (multiple harnesses, skills, MCP, etc). I use only the latest models: Opus 5, GPT 5.6 Sol. I experiment with different plan-build-evaluate frameworks like GSD, OpenSpec, Superpowers. I have a reasonable AGENTS.md without much cruft: test coverage ~80%, ASD-STE100 English, use uv - things like that.

I can churn out single-use scripts and micro-projects like there's no tomorrow - one shot GSD in autonomous mode usually nails it.

But when it comes to any larger software, it STARTS very promising, but very quickly becomes a quagmire of a death by thousand cuts. I steer the general ideas well enough, but the amount of code and tests quickly grows overwhelming, weird shit starts to creep in, 2000-test harness starts to test literal things, features error out, fixes take longer and produce tons of defensive code. Asking the model to "refactor if it improves readability and reduces complexity" usually only increases complexity. After $3-5k in tokens spent on a 100k+ LoC monstrosity I just don't even want to touch it anymore. AI feels like a trap that lures you with easy wins but then you pay the debts.

Many words to say the same as many others in this thread: good design takes time and working WITH the code, seeing and internalizing the decisions.

I also don't know what to do. Writing things completely by hand just doesn't feel right anymore, and co-designing with AI (as in laying out the classes and function contracts etc) feels weird because you need to iterate to build understanding, but the LLM will happily follow any stupid idea you happened to have.

Quadruple all of this when you work in a team and keep getting 5-minute effort 10k LoC PRs with 20-line load-bearing honest caveat comments.

Maybe it's time to get to woodworking.

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#78

Post by hanstyle »

socalgal2 wrote: post #50

I don’t think it has anything to do with AI. My thoughts: 1. It’s natural to lose interest in things. I used to be into pop music. Lost interest. I used to game a lot. Lost interest. I used to be into various TV shows, lost interest 2. Not special any more. I’m not sure this is true but I used to enjoy writing a blog. This was 1998-2005. Once everyone started posting via FB and Twitter it felt to me no longer like I…

[dead]

Re: Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?

#80

Post by oumua_don17 »

I'm using AI only to clean up all the accidental complexity in the legacy projects at work that I'm paid for (this is in all C++ and Python productized from a Lisp prototypes, the latter hasn't needed that!).

Outside of work, I've stopped using AI completely in all my side projects which is very counter intuitive because even this limited use of AI at work exhausts me. This has given me a nice balance, so I do hand craft code in side projects which keeps that (now considered legacy) skill alive in case the bubble pops and we go back to old ways!

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