The AI gave me unprecedented turn around time in experimentation. The same experiments would easily take me over a month in the past. Now it was a few days. But still, real progress is made only when my understanding catch up with reality.
Building technology to overcome relatable hardships and frictions is a worthy challenge full of meaning.
Using someone else's technology to erase frictions and hardships from your life can erode meaning.
On my worst days I am convinced programming and technological optimism is a theft of meaning; personal satisfaction at solving a human problem awkwardly mapped to technology, at the expense of users dating, socializing, or consuming with discomfort and therefore the possibility of growth and meaning.
It is a little alarming the way people treat AI as another human relationship, yes.
But AI is also a pretty useful research partner and rubber duck for ideas so long as you know going into it that it’s going to have a bias toward agreeing with you.
This situation reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes comics that mock the idea of Calvin’s dad’s idea of building character.
For example, I was debating ECC memory and cheap used business workstation hardware for a homelab recently with an AI. It helped me pick a system out of some eBay listings and verified whether the model and Xeon processor SKU supported ECC.
When I went to buy the RAM, it actually caught a mistake where I thought a listing was for UDIMM when it was actually RDIMM.
It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store.
dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
As much as you would have aspirations to be a pro soccer player, badly enough broken leg can prevent you from ever being good enough.
Your imagination of being pro player does go away when in reality you’re not fit for the purpose.
And something I wish the current crop of AI startups learn as well, just making XYZ agentic maybe isn't the answer to everything.
Same folks that said crypto will destroy traditional finance are now saying stuff like, AI will "destroy" all jobs and create a permanent underclass. Almost feels like every few years a new cult gets created with messaging perfectly designed to trigger the Gen-Z(/current college generation) into a frenzy and drinking the kool-aid.
Can't wait for it to be over (and then to do it all over again with something else). Being in my 30s helps. I care less :)
I agree. Unfortunately the AIs of this era relentlessly chase zeitgeist instead. That is they mostly try to generate output that will be a caress. To get the cold cocks we really need may require AI based on world models. But I assume that when we get there it will be just as socially and politically unpalatable as it always has been, and the world models will become deeply regulated to revert to the party line.
Since starting to use LLMs, I have actually been spending more time, at the console, than before.
One reason is that I like to ship (as opposed to "code"). That means a lot of tedious, boring stuff. The kind of thing that I want to "take a break before tackling," so I may take 30 minutes, and watch something on TV for a while, before rolling up my sleeves.
Now, the LLM can take care of a lot of this stuff, so I am not motivated to "take a break," so much, anymore.
It doesn't actually feel bad, but I now have to schedule "downtime." I never used to have to do that, before. My work always involved a lot of "context switch" points; naturally set up for taking breaks.
Before dealing with anything that might put me off. I can just ask the agent to do it for me. And then, do something else, take that break, but regardless in a few minutes I will have something to jump on instead of the same blank terminal with the same blinking cursor judging me. It really makes taking the first step, much easier and then the ball just gets rolling.
I see what his point is to be honest though, it's easy to say just one more week of polish, just 5 more features, etc.
My current business is profitable. Almost everything we built was still useless. Since 4 yrs ago.
The amount of effort that went into that "almost" Is something that I don't think AI moved any needle for even though half of our journey was after AI coding took off.
Speed of coding was never the problem, still isn't even if AI allegedly 10x-ed it.
If you're doing something that isn't like how people are used to things being done, is novel, or is contra to common beliefs, there's a good chance that nobody will believe in you. And in such situations, their lack of belief is not a reliable indicator of whether what you're doing is valid or correct. Most people's negative responses in such cases are emotional responses, not rational ones.
In such situations, "Being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not" and "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you" are not opposites.
The first is getting market feedback.
The second is just getting opinions.
It does require you to think carefully about what constitutes validation or invalidation of your ideas, though.
Probably not so different from past hype cycles, except maybe this time it will be different!
Who is responsible for this mess? ;)
Pain is part of reality. Suffering comes from wishing reality was different to how it is.
Maybe "things going bad suddenly in the near future" is just such a captivating idea to the human mind that those narratives will always find a way to dominate vs "everything will continue to slowly get better".