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bigstrat2003 • yesterday at 4:28 AM • 4 replies • view on HN

There's nothing to be excited for. Even if AI works as well as people say (and to be clear: it very much doesn't), that future sucks ass. No more fun making things, no fun solving problems, just hand it off to the machine that does things for you. That's an awful future where every shred of joy is gone from computing.


Replies

tptacek • yesterday at 4:33 AM

It might genuinely suck for you. It's amazing for people who couldn't build anything before, but now can. And there's more of them than you.

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wglb • yesterday at 2:24 PM

I find it is an amplifier of my skills, not a replacement.

sublinear • yesterday at 5:22 AM

I have never been able to understand this perspective. It's come up so often that it almost feels like a pro-AI propaganda strawman in the style of the "virgin vs chad" meme.

You can and should still write most of the code yourself and use AI to assist when you get stuck. Apart from saving yourself some hours because you no longer hit dead ends on google, I don't understand how that's meaningfully different from using a search engine and finding solutions on StackOverflow and GitHub. I don't even understand how people think this traditional workflow I'm suggesting is any slower than reviewing LLM output either. It takes the same cognitive load and the same time in the end. The only people who believe they can go faster and reduce cognitive load aren't just inexperienced, but also seem to have ADHD or something. Like they just wanna bask in the vibes of the machine-generated text scrolling by.

If your goal is to make something you're going to live with and maintain long term, or is more generally the foundation of a bigger idea, you can't ignore any part of the code or delegate it away. It's still writing that you're bound by like any other document.

echelon • yesterday at 4:36 AM

You're welcome to not make things.

Are you telling us the only reason why making things was fun is because it made you "special"? And now that anyone can do it it isn't worth it for you anymore?

That's the wrong reason to do something.

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