[NateEag]

> And I couldn’t have ever “stack overflowed” my way to diving into a project in a brand new language.

It's a very tiny project, but I dived straight into a new project in a new language completely by hand this month, precisely because I'm miserable and exhausted from my job requiring me to drive a bullshit machine instead of solving problems by thinking.

Getting a few minutes in the evening to actually program, and learn new things as I do it, has been crucial to maintaining any sanity at all in this brave new world of unending heaps of slop.

[simondotau]

I wish I had that kind of effortless motivation.

Learning any language involves internalising a massive pile of arbitrary syntax / core library knowledge. I find it flow-destroying and demotivating to be continually hampered by having to look up silly little things like how to get the length of a string, or how to work with dates. Being able to use AI to instantly turn a line of pseudo-code into a line of real code is not just great for productivity, it teaches me the language faster than any way I've experienced before.

My pre-AI coding style has always been to write terse pseudo-code first, just so I can map out core logic, what I'm iterating over, and what the meat of the routine will do. I formatted this pseudo-code as comments, and then treat them like headers, where I write the real code underneath. AI tab completion has made this way of coding insanely more productive, and gives me an incentive to write better pseudo.

(I also don't mind getting AI to write a whole page at a time, especially when it's a slab of uncreative boilerplate or glue code. AI routinely does a perfect job of smashing that out. But I will always pick through it line by line, renaming and rewriting in my personal style.)

[NateEag]

> I wish I had that kind of effortless motivation.

It is definitely not effortless - it's a battle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_Art_(book)

Over the decades, it's become one I love, and I can see how the struggle has helped me become a better musician, writer, programmer, and person.

Being compelled to use genAI by my employers has largely removed that struggle from my day-to-day, and I hate it passionately.

The replacement of careful thought and fighting to create something compact, elegant, and robust with reading thousands of lines of mediocre generated code, slogging through page after page of uninspired just-good-enough dreck in order to catch the LLM's inevitable moments of absolute failure is mind-deadening and tedious.

I am figuring out what other careers I can swap to if this becomes the new normal.