Isn't that the actual endgame, what we're doing? All tasks done, all software written, everything automated, housing and food for everyone, humanity free to enjoy whatever?
So yeah, enjoy whatever makes you happy. Take a break, find a hobby, travel somewhere. Or do nothing, that also works.
I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents.
I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?
I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools.
I think the more apt comparison would be a carpenter to a mass produced factory. If you've read any of Yegge's recent ramblings than factories of factories seem to be what the AI focused peeps like to produce.
Here is another thing I find frustrating, but I don't know the right way to express it. A lot of this AI tooling/coding seems self-indulgent? 'I built a better software factory!'. The tools are very powerful, but I don't see the results yet. The frustration outweighs results.
I am underwater dealing with it. I am getting outlandish PRs against Pion. So I spend my time triaging and feel burned out. The 'AI future' I was expecting would be people swooping in and clearing up the backlog in high quality ways.
Instead I get people trying to add new APIs when it can already be done with existing APIs and then arguing about it with me.
Please don't forget you are under no obligation to triage all the awful things.
You are well within your rights to require submitters reach a certain standard before you will review their request.
Your time is finite and precious. Your project benefits from your enthusiasm and knowledge. It does not benefit from you acting as human reviewer of a tsunami of low quality content.
You are allowed to be ruthlessly protective of your time to the benefit of your project.
Because the factories of factories is mostly bullshit. OpenAI blogged about how it was complicated for them to build a project using AI alone and the specs in the repo, how easy it was for models to get lost, not do what was expected of them and the burden it was on the team.
I don't think we will never get there but we're definitely not there yet. Models still require a lot of handholding to get things done.
First, anhedonia is a real psychological crisis. You might want to speak to a professional.
Second, the old saying "it's the journey not the destination" is apt here. If you didn't enjoy the process in the first place then even if AI never came around something would have knocked the wind out of your sails. If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing. Either learn to love the process or begin the journey of searching for some other thing to fill the void left behind.
Choose between 1. You don't love what you're working on or 2. You don't enjoy working with AI. IMO those are the two primary problems, and both solvable in their own way (more or less).
There might be a lot going on, depending on what kind of programming tasks you use AI for, but here's one hunch: I think the current AI usage pattern disrupts our core sense-making mechanism on the code we create. It jumps from nothing to a full implementation too quickly and there's no gradual learning curve (impedance match) gently pulling us along, which makes the coding process highly disorienting.
It's not crazy to feel this way. When the barrier to entry drops dramatically very quickly, it's natural to re-evaluate all your priorities. I personally flip between apathy and excitement.
User expectations are also going to grow. If you're already a dev, you're already ahead if you keep up. It's always been the case that someone could release a free package that makes your personal proprietary software suddenly hard to justify.
how are we supposed to answer that? we don't know anything about you lol. you gotta give me more info, like, results for what? when you're coding? what are you working on? is it driven by yourself or is it for your job? help me help you.
Roughly speaking, you might have taken a task that was in the control, flow, or relaxation zone, closer to the center there, and lowered the difficulty so much that now it's flat out in the middle of the boredom zone.
My answer to this is to either seek out much harder problems (moving it back up into challenge, for example), or to change to a task where I have lower skill and so am in the learning mode rather than the execution mode, which I find much more pleasant and compelling than boring.
You change the goalpost, basically, or give yourself a handicap, to bootstrap yourself back up into motivating regions of the graph. Just a model, but I think it's one that is really useful.
Same tbh. I lost my motivation to do any work aside from my job for a while. Now I'm working on some stuff for my friends, heavy using AI and it's just...meh. Whatever feeling of craftsmanship and skill I had is gone, now it's mostly mechanical. And if this is the case, I feel like I might as well go do something more interesting / lucrative / beneficial to society.
Isn't that the actual endgame, what we're doing? All tasks done, all software written, everything automated, housing and food for everyone, humanity free to enjoy whatever?
So yeah, enjoy whatever makes you happy. Take a break, find a hobby, travel somewhere. Or do nothing, that also works.
I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents.
I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?
I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools.
I think the more apt comparison would be a carpenter to a mass produced factory. If you've read any of Yegge's recent ramblings than factories of factories seem to be what the AI focused peeps like to produce.
Here is another thing I find frustrating, but I don't know the right way to express it. A lot of this AI tooling/coding seems self-indulgent? 'I built a better software factory!'. The tools are very powerful, but I don't see the results yet. The frustration outweighs results.
I am underwater dealing with it. I am getting outlandish PRs against Pion. So I spend my time triaging and feel burned out. The 'AI future' I was expecting would be people swooping in and clearing up the backlog in high quality ways.
Instead I get people trying to add new APIs when it can already be done with existing APIs and then arguing about it with me.
Please don't forget you are under no obligation to triage all the awful things.
You are well within your rights to require submitters reach a certain standard before you will review their request.
Your time is finite and precious. Your project benefits from your enthusiasm and knowledge. It does not benefit from you acting as human reviewer of a tsunami of low quality content.
You are allowed to be ruthlessly protective of your time to the benefit of your project.
Because the factories of factories is mostly bullshit. OpenAI blogged about how it was complicated for them to build a project using AI alone and the specs in the repo, how easy it was for models to get lost, not do what was expected of them and the burden it was on the team.
I don't think we will never get there but we're definitely not there yet. Models still require a lot of handholding to get things done.
First, anhedonia is a real psychological crisis. You might want to speak to a professional.
Second, the old saying "it's the journey not the destination" is apt here. If you didn't enjoy the process in the first place then even if AI never came around something would have knocked the wind out of your sails. If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing. Either learn to love the process or begin the journey of searching for some other thing to fill the void left behind.
Choose between 1. You don't love what you're working on or 2. You don't enjoy working with AI. IMO those are the two primary problems, and both solvable in their own way (more or less).
Actual doing is usually responsible for the long-term satisfaction people derive from work.
Cut that out and you're just managing an email inbox.
There might be a lot going on, depending on what kind of programming tasks you use AI for, but here's one hunch: I think the current AI usage pattern disrupts our core sense-making mechanism on the code we create. It jumps from nothing to a full implementation too quickly and there's no gradual learning curve (impedance match) gently pulling us along, which makes the coding process highly disorienting.
https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...
Because you perceive a readily available result to be worth less? Why do something whose value has gone down?
It's not crazy to feel this way. When the barrier to entry drops dramatically very quickly, it's natural to re-evaluate all your priorities. I personally flip between apathy and excitement.
User expectations are also going to grow. If you're already a dev, you're already ahead if you keep up. It's always been the case that someone could release a free package that makes your personal proprietary software suddenly hard to justify.
how are we supposed to answer that? we don't know anything about you lol. you gotta give me more info, like, results for what? when you're coding? what are you working on? is it driven by yourself or is it for your job? help me help you.
Motivational saliency requires both the ability to learn and increasing difficulty - witness video games.
The model I think makes sense here is the Csikszentmihalyi Flow model, by another name the challenge-skill model of effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Characterist...
Roughly speaking, you might have taken a task that was in the control, flow, or relaxation zone, closer to the center there, and lowered the difficulty so much that now it's flat out in the middle of the boredom zone.
My answer to this is to either seek out much harder problems (moving it back up into challenge, for example), or to change to a task where I have lower skill and so am in the learning mode rather than the execution mode, which I find much more pleasant and compelling than boring.
You change the goalpost, basically, or give yourself a handicap, to bootstrap yourself back up into motivating regions of the graph. Just a model, but I think it's one that is really useful.
Almost everyone is now about to feel what Lee Sedol felt a decade ago.
We are all Lee Sedol.
I didn't immediately get the reference. He is the Korean Go player who lost to AlphaGo in 2016.
Why does cheating give you impostor syndrome?
You stopped creating value and started extracting it. You stopped thinking about how to best serve humanity and started thinking about how to use AI
Same tbh. I lost my motivation to do any work aside from my job for a while. Now I'm working on some stuff for my friends, heavy using AI and it's just...meh. Whatever feeling of craftsmanship and skill I had is gone, now it's mostly mechanical. And if this is the case, I feel like I might as well go do something more interesting / lucrative / beneficial to society.