[coffeefirst]

So stop.

I’m serious. Treat it like any other tool. When it helps solves problems, use it. When it makes problems, don’t use it.

There are a lot of people and an enormous amount of money trying to make hands off agentic happen, but the happiest and most effective enthusiasts I know do not give up control: they go function by function and class by class, generating or writing as they see fit.

The goal is to make useful software. At least, I think that’s still true?

[sollawen]

Couldn't agree more. Honestly, I don't believe in 'loop engineering' after working with AI these past few months, I've seen a lot of its decisions are really unreliable — and if you let it loop-engineer all night long, it's definitely going to leave you a pile of shit.

[LocalH]

The problem with this affects professional coders more than hobby coders. Many jobs are pressuring their developers to use AI tools under threat of termination. Yeah, if you're coding on your free time, you can easily avoid AI. But many corporations have swallowed the AI Kool-Aid and actually require their devs to use AI tools.

The goal, to corporations, has never been to "make useful software". The true goal is "make software that will bring us a revenue stream". If they think they can use AI to do that faster with less human payment, then they'll snap at it. AI doesn't ask for its rights (because it's not AGI, so it doesn't have actual rights). AI just tries to do what its told, and fucks up at doing so at a higher rate than the average human. But corps think it'll be cheaper so they swallow the tales told to them by AI executives who have a highly vested interest in making sure you use their AIaaS.

Hobby coders are coding for the fun of it, and aren't going to use AI to code. They might use AI to help them understand the subject matter better, but the code that hobby coders write is highly unlikely to be AI vibecoded. Evidence: I severely doubt that any demosceners will ever use AI to write the actual demo code.