[ofjcihen]

For me it’s just become…incredibly boring.

There’s something uninspiring about a machine thats supposed to “do the hard things for you” so to speak. I like using my mind and understanding things deeply.

Sure you could say that “managing the AI” can be deeply understood in a way but it’s just not exciting.

[paul7986]

"But just need to know how to prompt AI properly to..,"

- Write a new top 40 song no talent required

- Write a business email, a school paper, etc & no talent required

- Design a logo, a website, an app, a billboard, etc and no talent required.

AI is the best thing to happen to humanity as it mimics & steals humanity for a few pie holes and us the majority does nothing to stop it!

[basch]

The Top 40 songs were already soulless.

Now that anyone can generate a halfway decent pop song at the snap of the finger leads to one of three outcomes. We all just listen to our own interactive stations and have no shared culture, pressure is put on industry to differentiate with a higher quality product, the technology is democratizing and unlocks a new generation of creatives who are able to work with it creating an amplified output.

[defrost]

#4 Some continue merrily onwards with weekly / regular jam sessions with friends and passers through, catering to all skill levels and largely ignoring top 40 and AI trends.

[tim333]

Not all of them. It's hard to get chart hits with AI. I've got a friend who tries but the AI songs are all kind of mediocre.

[greenrd]

I don't understand your comment. It's poorly-punctuated, and its hard to figure out what your position is. What's a "pie hole" as a metaphor for a person? Is that what you meant?

[paul7986]

My tone is a sarcastic depressive one attempting to convey the ridiculousness of the vaccuum we are in. A vaccuum that a few pie holes (nicer word then a-hole) have created and are benefitting greatly from while it causes many to millions lots of stress/anxiety/pain.

[koonsolo]

Are you suggesting AI can understand things deeply?

LLM's are fast at applying information, but thinking deeply, they do not.

I love LLM's, because now I can focus more on the creative and thinking deep aspect, and leave most of the typing and stack overflow browsing to the LLM.

[journeyman3538]

That’s more of a personal problem isn’t it. You can now work on things that are more valuable. Your old work and interests can be taken up as an art instead: to be enjoyed instead of existing for its function.

[absynth]

New role unlocked: starving artist!

Your parents could afford a house, have kids etc etc at a far younger age but now you are single with no kids and choosing food or rent or power. You spin the wheel! Lucky! You get to eat.

Progress!

[ofjcihen]

I think in a certain way your reply has underlined exactly why this AI frenzy has made things so uninteresting. Just maybe not the way you intended.

[throwanem]

Oh, he knows what he said. That's why he made a sockpuppet account to say it.

[guzfip]

> You can now work on things that are more valuable

So can any other idiot. And we only need so many of them.

[theshrike79]

That's just silly. AI is really bad at the hard things. What it's really good at is automating the tedium away.

Like I had a connector made for service X. Needed one for Y and Z, all use the same basic authentication scheme, but slight differences on where they want the bits set at.

That used to be a week-long project easily with me going through the docs for each service, maybe copy-pasting something from service X and modifying the bits by hand.

Now I can just go "look at projects/service-x-api, now do that but for Service Y in projects/service-y-api" to an agent, tab away and come back to a 90-100% working thing. It went through the API documentation by itself, looked up some blog posts on the undocumented crap they added in January that broke the official flow and made it work.

Meanwhile I could do something with actual impact, helped other people learn stuff and wrote internal guidelines.

[vrighter]

I have never had it automate any tedium for me. Because if I didn't write it, I need to scrutinize all of it, but without the benefit of a prebuilt mental model. Reading through tons of similar looking code (because it's supposed to automate boilerplate) looking for subtle mistakes is mind numbingly boring. It's like looking at a wall full of periods in font size 8, and trying to find the one comma.

[theshrike79]

_Writing_ tons of similar looking code is equally error prone.

Only a complete psycho doesn't copy-paste code when doing something thats 90% repetitive.

Ironically our AI PR review has caught a bunch of those during unrelated commits :D

[cortesoft]

I am curious where you draw your line. We have all sorts of “machines that do the hard things for you”, do you shun them all? Cars, washing machines, lawnmowers, etc…

I know that AI has some different characteristics than those technologies, but my point is that I don’t think your issue is that does the hard things for you… there has to be something else going on.

[ofjcihen]

I don’t know that washing machines have replaced understanding things on a deep level but if they have for you I’m very curious to hear how.

[whattheheckheck]

The zen of doing your chores by hand

[theshrike79]

There's a specific set of people who get a Zen feeling from doing things the long way.

I'm not one of those, my brain doesn't give me any more dopamine whether I spent a long time doing a thing or took a shortcut. I don't even get dopamine from completing the task, I just get a list of more things that need to be done.

[customguy]

Thinking about the world and oneself isn't a repetitive chore in the way washing your clothes is.

"I doubt, therefore I think, I think, therefore I am" -- if I no longer think, what's left? Biomass? Why us then.. why not goo, or just more parking space?

[whattheheckheck]

Energy and awareness. Were more empty than whole and the cells that do make up an invididual are not 100% human. And all of it the periodic table of elements

[nunez]

fwiw i still wash my clothes by hand when I travel! it's a very useful skill!

[tacostakohashi]

Another example of a machine that does the hard things for you that springs to mind is... a computer.

[fatbird]

Are you this patronizing and condescending in the rest of your life?

[cortesoft]

I am sorry if I came off that way, that was not my intent.

[ffsm8]

I find comments like yours very strange.

> do the hard things for you

The only people advocating for that are the same kind of people which were pitching the cloud as a solution for your hosting needs.

Ime the sweet spot for development with LLMs is to figure out what you need to do and then do that through AI. Yes, it'll still make some decisions there, but did you really get satisfaction from the decisions of eg what to call a class before? At last I didn't.

You can of course try to offload everything to the LLM and not tell it what to do, but only specify what it should enable (spec driven), but at that point youre gambling wherever the output will work and the project becomes unmaintainable - which may be fine too in certain scenarios, that's just pretty rare in a business context

[whattheheckheck]

What's your claim to fame for life's work of using your mind?

[ofjcihen]

Being the first in my family to rise out of poverty through self education.

To be fair your response seems somewhat revealing of your own situation.

[whattheheckheck]

Thats amazing, great job. I was curious. Only somewhat. Thanks for sharing