Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing? When AI makes results readily available, why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing? |
Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing? When AI makes results readily available, why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing? |
We are all Lee Sedol.
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.
When I was little, I was surprised to find that using a Game Genie made a lot of Nintendo games instantly become boring.
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
take a look at how often lions just kinda, like, sit there.
AI does not create world shattering products.
You haven’t made any big hits either (with or without AI).
What’s changed?
Use AI all you want, that isn’t going to bring your passion to life. It’s no different than using an IDE or React or GitHub.
The world is still starving for novel experiences and solutions to annoying problems and clunky workflows.
AI hasn’t changed that. It hasn’t delivered anything either. For that you need the lonely mind of a man
Outside of work, I've stopped using AI completely in all my side projects which is very counter intuitive because even this limited use of AI at work exhausts me. This has given me a nice balance, so I do hand craft code in side projects which keeps that (now considered legacy) skill alive in case the bubble pops and we go back to old ways!
Hypothetically if Google starts hiring paint dry watchers I’d do it for 200k a year
You may have seen the regular stream of youtube videos in your feed with the hook that reads something like "humans will be obsolete in two years" or "software development as a career is over".
I disagree, and furthermore, that's a psyop! Don't believe the hype!
You may have seen the endless stream of technical articles here complaining about the craft going out of coding and devs being reduced to AI slop pull request reviewers.
I scoff at these devs, have they no agency? I also choose to believe they are part of the psyop even if they are real people with real experiences because their articles get boosted with a purpose.
And what do I believe the purpose is? What is the psyop? I think it is many-pronged.
We developers are quite powerful in society, and it is useful to humble us from time to time. It is useful to keep us compliant. Having us accept a dire fate makes it easier to tamp down wage inflation (which helps pay the AI tab in the short term, BTW!).
Also, regarding cycles and generations, having AI pump out an ocean of tech debt creates busy work for future generations to unravel. This make-work aimed at maintaining and fixing things is useful in that it keeps people steadily employed and controls the rate of new development and technological advancement.
Sometimes I muse when I hear stories about AI vendors' ability to "turn up/down" the intelligence factor on coding agents. Is this a fine tuning of the slop error factor getting it just where they need it to be?
I observe in my career that getting developer tools paid for by corporations has been a bit like getting blood from a stone. Yet suddenly, corporate america is in a rush to put this super costly _subscription-based_ tool in my hands. What gives?
Yes, latest fad/bubble/craze. A few sillycon valley tech bros are trying to make a computer god superintelligence to worship and control, maybe, ugh I guess probably some of them.
But, from a metaphysical standpoint, one can argue there is a "spirit" to every age. This age's spirit seems obsessed with management. And, there are high level leaders who are obsessed with managing the human population with ever-increasing fidelity. So of course AI will be the latest finance/technology/information system that is released along those lines.
It's your choice how to proceed, as with all things use your free will. I will observe you do everyone you know and all of your descendants the most good if you constantly strive to have the highest aims.
In my opinion, 'slop' creates an unacceptable crisis. Slop will continue the wheel of wasted energy and potential that we are in now. To break this cycle, developers need to be obsessed with controlled code, zero bugs, and human-led software design.
What does any of that mean in practice? How? The answers come from our community, from thought leaders and taste makers. We need to develop industry standards to judge one another by and then hold one another accountable.
As to you personally and your passion problem, I get it. I am feeling the same. I hope you have a small personal project, maybe never to be shared, that you can at least retreat to when your energy is low.
I recently stayed up late and upgraded the build system on mine, just some busy work I knew I needed to get done and which let me ply some new devops techniques I learned. It felt really good to be reminded that I could be productive and clever even in a low energy situation. And my week improved after that.
Wikipedia[1] says Deep Blue had 30x 120Mhz CPUs and 480 custom VLSI chess chips, and could do 11 GFLOPS. HN[2] says that's roughly an iPhone 5s.
Wikipedia[2] says 11 GFLOPS of compute power cost about half a billion inflation-adjusted dollars in the mid 1980s when the Deep Blue project was started; cost about half a million in 1996 when it was playing Kasparov; costs about 12 cents today. (Of course it's daft to compare custom chess chips and CPUs and GPUs, supercomputers and mobile SoCs, but it'll do).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_(chess_computer)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9626731
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_operations_per_...
In my case, I felt that I was pretty good at rapid product prototyping and had made that part of my identity. Then AI agents made it trivial. It took me some time to process and accept that reality. But I’m okay with it now. I simply had to move on.
After a while, I found two things that have helped:
1. Leaning into other areas where AI can boost my skills rather than just replace them, such as writing (for example, my last two posts made it to the front page of HN) and sales (leads, proposals, etc)
2. Taking on more ambitious projects. I used to think about side projects I could complete in days, and now I think more about projects I can complete in months. With AI, days have become hours and months have become days, so I simply try to think of projects that would have taken me a long time before.
I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?
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.
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.
I suspect there's some survivorship bias at play here. You don't hear what the tradesmen who shied away from using powertools thought because they ceased to find work as tradesmen.
In the same way, future software makers will all be raving about their favorite LLM.
AI feels like something else entirely. You're not even doing the writing or the thinking, you're telling someone else to do it and they "do" it.
It's more like a carpenter walking into a factory and saying to someone I want to build xyz and it builds it immediately.
I wonder if hand coding will become mostly a hobby and maybe a niche market. I’m not saying I like it, that’s tbd, but I wonder about it.
https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...
I consider myself reasonably skilled in AI usage (multiple harnesses, skills, MCP, etc). I use only the latest models: Opus 5, GPT 5.6 Sol. I experiment with different plan-build-evaluate frameworks like GSD, OpenSpec, Superpowers. I have a reasonable AGENTS.md without much cruft: test coverage ~80%, ASD-STE100 English, use uv - things like that.
I can churn out single-use scripts and micro-projects like there's no tomorrow - one shot GSD in autonomous mode usually nails it.
But when it comes to any larger software, it STARTS very promising, but very quickly becomes a quagmire of a death by thousand cuts. I steer the general ideas well enough, but the amount of code and tests quickly grows overwhelming, weird shit starts to creep in, 2000-test harness starts to test literal things, features error out, fixes take longer and produce tons of defensive code. Asking the model to "refactor if it improves readability and reduces complexity" usually only increases complexity. After $3-5k in tokens spent on a 100k+ LoC monstrosity I just don't even want to touch it anymore. AI feels like a trap that lures you with easy wins but then you pay the debts.
Many words to say the same as many others in this thread: good design takes time and working WITH the code, seeing and internalizing the decisions.
I also don't know what to do. Writing things completely by hand just doesn't feel right anymore, and co-designing with AI (as in laying out the classes and function contracts etc) feels weird because you need to iterate to build understanding, but the LLM will happily follow any stupid idea you happened to have.
Quadruple all of this when you work in a team and keep getting 5-minute effort 10k LoC PRs with 20-line load-bearing honest caveat comments.
Maybe it's time to get to woodworking.
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.
I can still hike to the top of mountains even though helicopters exist, but if helicopter tourism is as popular as it seems to be becoming, and Bluetooth speakers are as available as they are, the journey and result is going to feel very different, if it's not entirely ruined.
I do sometimes miss programming by hand; the flow state, the satisfaction upon completion, the sense of ownership and identity. But it feels similar to how I look back on doing math in college... a fun thing I was pursuing at the time. An academic and pure thing that I may return to as a hobby someday.
In general, the direction I would explore is: it's not about AI, it's about something in the way your perceive AI. For example, maybe you value (some part of) the process. AI is about short-circuiting the (creative) process, so that may make making things feel pointless.
This is just one assumption, there are probably many more dimensions and variables at play. Maybe you read some perspectives about AI (and/or AI safety) that triggered something in your values about the creative process. Or maybe you want to create via a specific way of collaboration, which is no longer viable. As I said, we (and you) would need more to understand.
Have you ever thought about making your values explicit? Here's a PDF that has a list of values to assess between important and not important:
https://www.motivationalinterviewing.org/sites/default/files...
(I like this PDF because it includes definitions.)
Before there were factories, if you wanted a chair you needed an artisan to make one for you. When factories pumped out chairs, there was no need for the artisan to make chairs. But building factories that made chairs was a craft in itself. If you wanted a factory to make chairs, you needed an artisan to set one up for you. A craft became redundant, but enabled another to exist.
It's natural to mourn a craft that becomes redundant. But such an event is not unique.
I do think there is something different about AI, though, in that it attacks the craft of cognition itself. At some point there's no room for a human artisan to build on top. The required faculties become too great for any human mind.
It's particularly frustrating that it's simultaneously superhuman and incredibly unreliable when it comes to cognition.
E.g. it can whip out 100,000 lines of code in the time you'd write 500...but 5% of that code will be janky, or subtly buggy, etc.
It's the "oh...you're absolutely right!" effect. I can't think of any other tools that are so powerful yet so finnicky and almost guaranteed to fail in ways that are so difficult to detect.
Some big gnarly problems remain (e.g. continual learning), but I think the fact of AI existing and being better than humans at cognition no longer seems like something out in the far future.
That appears to be the crux of it. There are still fun problems to be tackled. In fact, I'm having a ton of fun figuring out how to use AI to build subtractive solutions: solutions that remove, or reduce to enhance what is left.
This is burning people out at astronomical rates. We had a principal engineer randomly quit and he said he is straight up leaving IT and not coming back due to the AI nonsense. I've heard this same story across the tech world as well - people are done with this garbage.
I can understand your sentiment for work-related tasks where we are all under the microscope of KPIs and OKRs in a survival-mode society, but for the quoted part specifically, i'm curious what was the underlying motivation that no longer exists.
Or you play chess, but now you can insta-win by blinking left eye twice.
3) showing off your complex hand-crafted accomplishment no longer earns you as much social capital as it did five years ago.
I had the same feeling at some point, until I went back to coding by hand just to exercise my skills, and I have to say after a while it felt so much better and I was hooked on working my little side project. Using AI doesn't scratch the same itch for me.
So yeah, enjoy whatever makes you happy. Take a break, find a hobby, travel somewhere. Or do nothing, that also works.
This obviously won't happen, because we could do it now, could have done it already, long before AI.
Let me know when AI solves greed and cruelty.
It's in the act of solving greed and cruelty right now, but it's gonna magnify both for a little while before it's finally solved forever. There won't be any humans left alive when it's done, but that's the price we must pay for "Peace on Earth".
Ocean view mansions and steak dinners for everyone!
Cut that out and you're just managing an email inbox.
In the beforetimes, a lot of people didn't value software, but many software developers still did.
You don't have to jump through hoops of your own making to justify the things you want to enjoy and, outside of the workplace, people won't value you as an individual based on any set of performance criteria.
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.
I'm not surprised professional software developers are not enjoying AI development.
My thoughts:
1. It’s natural to lose interest in things. I used to be into pop music. Lost interest. I used to game a lot. Lost interest. I used to be into various TV shows, lost interest
2. Not special any more. I’m not sure this is true but I used to enjoy writing a blog. This was 1998-2005. Once everyone started posting via FB and Twitter it felt to me no longer like I was doing something special. That might be egotistical but whatever. I felt like I didn’t have as much to say
Similarly I made games for decades. Then Unity and Unreal made it trivial. New games are posted hourly on itch.io and 1000 other sites. I no longer felt special making a game
If anything I think AI might contribute here. It used to feel special to code. Now, anyone can do it. Yes they are not perfect. But I’ve met non coders making really impressive apps. and, it will only get better at it.
That said, LLMs have made me pick up and complete 6 projects in the last 6 months. They removed the tedium and frustration of dealing with bad docs, version breaks, etc and let me build the things I wanted to build without getting stuck in the weeds
all of this is the long way of saying, whatever issue you’re having with motivation it’s got nothing to do with AI. It’s something else and you’re just using AI as an excuse because it’s the new thing
There are plenty of unsolved problems in this world. Rather than rant how seniors still live mostly analog lives because "tech is aimed at 20-somethings", the old saying goes, solving problems that don't make a quick buck and scale to insane (and as we see with Meta, unsustainable) sizes [0] but which meet needs is the definition of "value".
No trillion dollar IPO, just problems solved, and solved more easily (supposedly). Everyone's looking for the goose that lays golden eggs, (and spending trillions to do so) when there's a need for the edible variety. Metaphor; I'm not suggesting going into the egg business.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49505036
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/mark-zuckerberg-shockin...
There's a reason we as a civilization decided to create intellectual property laws. We wanted there to be an incentive for creative people--authors, coders, illustrators--to improve the world with creative works. Art and writing improve our lives. AI dismantles that incentive, and thereby makes life that much more bland.
Yes, I do use emdashes. But I don't use AI.
Even I don't really feel like doing much in programming, although I've always wanted to code. Vibe coding still feels a little nebulous and difficult to direct to make something good.
I'm looking to go into Medicine, so I don't think its just me being less intelligent (even though I recognize that as a possibility).
Try to think of yourself as a professor who's trying to come up with a problem statement worth solving. The AI is your "lab" that will help you run experiments.
I actually enjoy work more now.
That's not remotely true, but it's not just noise pollution, it's also actual pollution, and it cheapens the overall experience with the presence of an excessive amount of people who've potentially pnly bought their way there and have no long-term care for keeping it serene. More litter, dog shit on the trail perhaps, etc.. and yes more noise.
It's an analogy for the poisoning of the market for whatever you'd be working on, hollowing of the process to get there, and further destruction of the long-term viability of the pursuit itself by compromising its integrity through transactional commodification. In theory, there will always be people who exclusively and ruthlessly only care about the numbers, getting the product "done", or the raw numeric achievement of climbing the mountain, which is how everything gets enshittified.
Similar thing with gaming. You could tell me that if I truly like a game, it shouldn't matter how much they gradually dumb it down, make it efficient to play for almost anyone, or pack it tip-to-taint with microtransactions, but the reality is that all of those factors are the equivalent of strip mining the player base and leaving an empty pit.
I went back to using Opus 4.8. I don't feel like the newest models are all that much better. The tooling around them has gotten better, and i guess mythos et al are good at hacking or whatever, but the models don't seem any better at not making mistakes than 6-8 months ago
I dunno, I feel my comparison is more apt. AI tries to anything & everything. A powered drill just drills, and saves your arm/wrist from a manual drill.
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.
I ask both as a maintainer who has been overwhelmed and as someone who declines to participate in communities where the bar is set too high for casual drive-by contributions.
If that can't be done, e.g. because it's a very large refactor that can only be published as a unit, get them to walk you through each design and architectural choice.
I don't think a high quality contributor will take issue with that.
I’d imagine I’d just want to turn repo’s private or gate who has access, that’s my default response.
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.