„The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall.“ -Mitch Hedberg

  > Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?

Post-work society is an inevitability if we don't destroy our planet.

> Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?

I built a phone app recently, not released to the public, just an idea I had for ages but could never spend the time actually building. Its 100% vibe coded, and took me a few weekends to build... I'm talking a few hours in total.

The point I'm making is that you now have the power to create stuff you would never have had the time to build. You can think big, wild stuff. Experimentation. Throw-away code.

What a time to be alive!

You're not being ambitious enough! Spend your tokens now building the primitives and foundations of much larger, complex systems. No matter how much faster and more efficient models get, eliminating the gruntwork will always pay dividends.

Yeah. I’m almost glad I didn’t invest any time in any of my 100s ideas for a startup. Most of them would be destroyed by AI by now.

But, you can create cool stuff just for yourself. That’s the upside. It’s just hard to make a living on cool stuff for yourself.

Maybe instead of creating cool stuff try to go and solve real problems? It seems to me that we are lacking in that department since all that LLM fuss has started 3 or so years ago.

The point is to inject something into the process that these AIs can't do for you.

People SHOULD feel like making a useless Mario Kart clone isn't worth the effort anymore. They should, instead, be trying to figure out how to actually use these models to make something that doesn't feel like a useless Mario Kart clone.

lol have you actually tried to build anything useful e2e? Leaving the AI to itself gives horrendous results.

Is there a point in playing Chess or Go when you know there's a computer out there that can beat you (and everyone else)?

The process was for you, the product was for the world.

Now it's just the product for the world, which was where most of the value was anyways.

It's a big paradigm shift and the industry is quickly going to shed people who needed the process to care about the product and we'll be left with people whose motivation to build the product (or money) is enough.

Don't worry, like with every revolutionary technology before this, it takes 5-10 years for people to find new and creative ways to use it. It will be considered its own medium in many spaces (e.g. film is now different to theatre)

Then learn how to be creative and use the ai better?

IMO there has been a regime shift to building things for yourself and what is cool is the output of the tools you make.

I have started building my own Digital Audio Workstation. The point is not to build something to compete with Ableton. The point is to build something and make music with it. If it is a good tool then I should be able to make good music with it and release the music. Actually, the DAW should be the secret sauce of the music and something I wouldn't want to give away.

This feels a lot more like computing in the 90s after taking an odd 25 year detour of an obsession with the tools themselves instead of what the tools can actually do.

This has not been my experience so far.

You can contribute to Open Source projects that DO NOT allow AI generated code. For example: zig

It's less lack of interest in creating that bothers me, it's my lack of interest in learning – it would surely be crazy for a SWE to care about how some new framework works anymore? Even if someone could reasonably argue that it might be slightly useful today there's almost zero chance it will be useful in 6-12 months times.

But it's not just tech – my lack of interest in learning and creating is starting to generalise with the models. Music, writing, coding, maths, etc...

I need to get used to switching my head off and asking the AIs to think for me whenever I need to engage my brain. It still feels very unnatural.

Make cool stuff because the process is fun and makes you learn?

I think the limit increasingly becomes what your imagination and taste can reach

Agreed

Can it? Last I checked, all my free software operating systems and browsers were still hacked together trash. I can't wait for AI to actually be good so I can spam a bunch of AGPL code with it.