it’s crack for burnt out programmers who don’t enjoy the process of creating software anymore. You get to have results without putting in any work of your own. In corpo-world where everything is a metric, outputting massive amounts of code quickly and effortlessly is a great thing. For the others who actually enjoy making something it’s a useless tool.
It’s really weird when people with a kink try to push that kink on everyone else and they act like everyone else is wrong for building their entire persona around the kink. We get it, you really love hand crafting your code, line by line character by character, but I don’t need that to enjoy coding. I like producing useful things and then working on ways to make them even more useful. I have hand crafted enough widgets and thingamabobs that I don’t need to personally fondle another one into existence. I don’t need to be an expert at yet another language that will be obsolete well before I retire. When I was a young lad I could get off a really good wank to the bra section of the Woolworths catalog, but not so much anymore. That doesn’t mean I am burnt out or that I don’t like a good wank anymore, but frankly I would prefer someone with a pretty face and soft hands to yank on my dick for me. Have you never worked with or trained junior programmers before? I guarantee you that the nonsense a junior can produce is much worse than the crazed hallucinations of some AI.
There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, like the destruction of the dev experience pipeline… but shitting on people who manage to find ways to use AI is not really helping your crusade.
I generally try to avoid using AI for my hobby projects, but I think there is still a niche for it in working out issues that take a disproportionate amount of time to track down manually relative to the scale of the fix. Things like a subtle typo somewhere or missing some hyperspecific nuance of whatever stack I’m working with. In those particular cases I would say it actually enhances my own creative ability insofar as I don’t need to spend hours of effort banging my head against a wall until I eventually figure out what went wrong, and I can put that time and mental energy into the stuff that’s actually interesting to me.
But yes, in general I do agree it’s kind of useless otherwise for creative endeavors or passion projects. It’s great for helping with code being written solely for a paycheck, but for personal projects it largely defeats the purpose of working on them in the first place. I think the trouble is that in general AI does make a lot of things easier and I have a lot of anxiety about getting into the habit of overusing it in that way, so I try to keep it as a sort of last resort.
That’s pretty accurate, but only the good case. Burnt out programmers still have some kind of system understanding and some kind of leftover appreciation for good software architecture, they’ve just been battered down by years of the stupidest requirements, deadlines and incompetent management. Even with AI they usually keep a hand on the wheel and aren’t particularly set on always using it for everything. Maybe they’ll even start advocating for AI because they can’t imagine anyone using it in a different way than they do.
The bad case is all the people who never cared about anything to begin with and aren’t any more emotionally attached to writing code than they are to filling out an excel sheet. That’s the kind of people that will absolutely derail an entire project by vibecoding it into the ground and then arguing for every single thing Claude changed. “You have to be able to understand/code this yourself” does stop them dead and they will piss and shit themselves because they can’t do anything and aren’t used to feeling stupid.Tbh I mostly like no-AI policies because it’s funny to see those meltdowns 🤷
it’s crack for burnt out programmers who don’t enjoy the process of creating software anymore. You get to have results without putting in any work of your own. In corpo-world where everything is a metric, outputting massive amounts of code quickly and effortlessly is a great thing. For the others who actually enjoy making something it’s a useless tool.
It’s really weird when people with a kink try to push that kink on everyone else and they act like everyone else is wrong for building their entire persona around the kink. We get it, you really love hand crafting your code, line by line character by character, but I don’t need that to enjoy coding. I like producing useful things and then working on ways to make them even more useful. I have hand crafted enough widgets and thingamabobs that I don’t need to personally fondle another one into existence. I don’t need to be an expert at yet another language that will be obsolete well before I retire. When I was a young lad I could get off a really good wank to the bra section of the Woolworths catalog, but not so much anymore. That doesn’t mean I am burnt out or that I don’t like a good wank anymore, but frankly I would prefer someone with a pretty face and soft hands to yank on my dick for me. Have you never worked with or trained junior programmers before? I guarantee you that the nonsense a junior can produce is much worse than the crazed hallucinations of some AI.
There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, like the destruction of the dev experience pipeline… but shitting on people who manage to find ways to use AI is not really helping your crusade.
I generally try to avoid using AI for my hobby projects, but I think there is still a niche for it in working out issues that take a disproportionate amount of time to track down manually relative to the scale of the fix. Things like a subtle typo somewhere or missing some hyperspecific nuance of whatever stack I’m working with. In those particular cases I would say it actually enhances my own creative ability insofar as I don’t need to spend hours of effort banging my head against a wall until I eventually figure out what went wrong, and I can put that time and mental energy into the stuff that’s actually interesting to me.
But yes, in general I do agree it’s kind of useless otherwise for creative endeavors or passion projects. It’s great for helping with code being written solely for a paycheck, but for personal projects it largely defeats the purpose of working on them in the first place. I think the trouble is that in general AI does make a lot of things easier and I have a lot of anxiety about getting into the habit of overusing it in that way, so I try to keep it as a sort of last resort.
That’s pretty accurate, but only the good case. Burnt out programmers still have some kind of system understanding and some kind of leftover appreciation for good software architecture, they’ve just been battered down by years of the stupidest requirements, deadlines and incompetent management. Even with AI they usually keep a hand on the wheel and aren’t particularly set on always using it for everything. Maybe they’ll even start advocating for AI because they can’t imagine anyone using it in a different way than they do.
The bad case is all the people who never cared about anything to begin with and aren’t any more emotionally attached to writing code than they are to filling out an excel sheet. That’s the kind of people that will absolutely derail an entire project by vibecoding it into the ground and then arguing for every single thing Claude changed. “You have to be able to understand/code this yourself” does stop them dead and they will piss and shit themselves because they can’t do anything and aren’t used to feeling stupid.Tbh I mostly like no-AI policies because it’s funny to see those meltdowns 🤷