Ask HN: Handle Demotivation

4 points by morph123 3 years ago | 7 comments

Hello all.

I have had some motivational issues lately with regards to software development. In the past I used to really love programming.

Learning new frameworks, languages, paradigms. Building random things, cutting my teeth into all sorts of things from IoT to blockchain to ML. It always felt like an endless treasure trove of interesting problems to solve.

However after the whole generative AI thing I am finding it very hard to care. I have come to the conclusion that I like the craftsmanship portion of software dev more than the actual product I am making as odd as it sounds. Which generative AI obviously completely replaces. Is anyone in the same boat? How do you handle it?

solumunus 3 years ago |

I honestly just can't fathom how this a common take right now. We're so far away from AI being a genuinely reliable for software developers. It's basically just StackOverflow+, sometimes even worse because of hallucinations and not being able to use your intuition to sniff out the better answers. Did software development becomes less popular or in demand since the invention of StackOverflow? No, the hobby and profession has grown tremendously since then. These things are productivity enhancers (for some), nothing more.

If your apathy comes from believing that much better models (which will render programming a pointless endeavour) are right around the corner then I just think you're buying into the hype and your prediction is way off. The current models are trained on all the data available, there is nothing more to learn from. As public information grows then the scope of answers will grow, and as models improve they will emulate human responses better. Will they get better at programming? They're only as good as the training data, which will ALWAYS be unreliable and full of errors or missing context, how could it be any other way?

ineedausername 3 years ago | |

Most people actually believe ai is taking over software jobs xd

nicbou 3 years ago |

Write less software.

My love died the moment I was paid to build other people's stuff for 40 hours a week.

Now I use programming in support of other tasks and I can't get enough of it. It became fun again, like cooking for myself after quitting as a line cook.

AI feels rather useless to me. It can generate bullshit but it can hardly blaze new trails. It's great for dealing with the tedium, but not for solving problems that require a great deal of context.

Gooblebrai 3 years ago | |

So, did you change careers?

nicbou 3 years ago | | |

Yes, to something tech-adjacent. I run a website, but the content is more important than the tech behind it. I use tech to solve immediate problems, instead of building a very small part of a very big business.

gwnywg 3 years ago |

I don't pay much attention to all noise about generative AI (although I must admit, I'm so impressed with chatgpt). This might be wishful thinking but I do believe AI has looooong way before it will be able to fix bugs in existing systems.

When I feel like loosing motivation I go and play a few clashes [1], this always cheers me up :)

https://www.codingame.com/multiplayer/clashofcode

matt3210 3 years ago |

AI cant design software. You can ask it to to do X and it will do X if X is simple enough. Ask it to "Create an API for unifying financial APIs" and it will not do squat.