waste of time.

Yes, it's funny to see programmers of all people, uber-technologists, shoot "i'm walking around in the woods videos" decrying the end of human civilisation merely because one specific craft practice is being automated.

AI isnt taking 'human creativity' away, this is an incredibly parochial and self-interested take. Its taking human creativity, as expressed in certain 20th C. crafts, away. Just as textile art has gone, and we don't have lace everywhere any more -- so it goes, that handcrafted programming goes to.

Engineers are those people who do that to human civilisation. That's always been the job. Replace people with machines. So it goes.

The only themes that rhyme imo are the loss of power to a smaller subset of humans (owners) and technological advancement enabling us to produce more (not necessarily better quality) with smaller costs. But people think that the history will repeat itself, and Jevons paradox will hold true, because it held in the Industrial Revolution; quote from the article: "Eventually, everything should be fine. The technology will be more powerful, and the job will still be there, it’ll just look different."

In this revolution, what if instead of being the human that invented the steam engine, we are the horses? "What happened to all the horses replaced by machines after industrialization? Humans keep a few around for entertainment but that’s about it." [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50147755

Creating something visually interesting Invisible-Cities-ish is basically a task with a billion or more satisfactory outcomes. You don't have a precise view on what makes an invisible city a good one as long as it has all the fancy looking bells and whistles. This means the AI can generate a bunch of tokens which as long as they technically work (which it seems the max-thinking did not fully) produce a "good" result. This makes you think - wow AI is impressive. However if many things in the system really mattered, it might have been much less successful as the AI may have made poor assumptions. This was basically a task that given a large volume of tokens and technical competence it's fairly easy for the AI to do a good job at because we don't evaluate it with any depth/precision. I think the same is true for music, where there are basically an infinite number of combinations of sounds, beats, melodies, etc. which are pleasant to hear - and songs aren't mission critical - so alignment is not a big issue. Generative AI is good at these tasks.

I’m not sure how this causes an identity crisis. But if my purpose in life was to churn out random stuff that wasn’t meaningful to people, I would assume that I would be crisising much earlier than now.

god is this a perfect encapsulation of the jagged nature of LLMs. incredible and kind of broken. for now at least

I’ve been coding since I was 6. In my 40s now. Making stuff. Making stuff in meatspace, too.

I always told myself that I enjoyed coding, that I enjoyed making stuff.

I was wrong. I hate coding. I hate standing in a ditch with heavy cables slung over me. I hate neck and eye strain from hours bent over a soldering iron.

What I like, what drives me - the outcomes. The neat bit of software that I conceptualised and now have in my hands. The mad Heath Robinson contraption that somehow makes the machine that goes “ping!”, in fact, go ping.

I’ve always recognised that I am a lazy asshole - but there has always been a carve-out for creating - yet the giant heap of unfinished projects tells me my “eh, amanhã” attitude does in fact persist throughout many avenues of my life, even those I thought I enjoyed.

Me, I fucking love vibe coding. I get to go to bed at a sensible hour, and wake up in the morning like it’s bloody Christmas Day, as I know there’s going to be something cracking to play with. The ideas I have, realised, without me having to slog through the weeds. Nobody sucking their teeth at the scope. No “madaxe got distracted by another shiny object”.

I’ve executed on basically every digital must and should that I’ve come up with over the last decade, in the last nine months. I’m now onto the “could haves” and “would like to haves”.

And… I’ll be honest. Maintainability, understanding what it does under the hood - for the first time in my life I barely care about, as next year I can have a better model do it again, and better.

So, I like the outcome. I like having an idea and seeing it come to life. What happens between A and B isn’t terribly important, as it turns out that not all paths are the goal.

And I think the same may apply to a lot of creative people - I mean, artists had and have artisans for a reason - and now we can all have an ever-improving artisan.