Ask HN: Disillusioned after AI?

I find it more interesting you view "AI" as a threat at all, instead of leveraging it to your advantage. Did Squarespace/Wix kill frontend development? Did any low code/no code solution kill development at all?

> whatever I am going to build will just get gobbled away by some big tech company

This has been happening since the industry existed. X company copies/acquires Y and things go to die. New things pop up, the cycle repeats.

Sounds like you're going through a rough patch.

Meh. AI is like having a super senior developer on your team to ask questions of. They don’t always give the correct answer.

I am now able to build things I could never do before. I have never felt more excited about what I am able to complete.

> The demos just become more cringey, the messaging more duplicitous and fake-authentic.

Completely agree, and this is a sign that they're just riding the hype train. Why does that make you feel disillusioned? What do you want to build or are building that would get gobbled away?

Even before AI, I always considered my work to be like a Tibetan sand painting. As soon I was off the project it may have just been wiped away. Quite a few things I built never launched or never got adoption. You're never guaranteed success at anything.

I feel it. I'll add that I'm also rather scared of how AI's compute and data hungry nature is de-democratizing tech and...reality in a big way. A handful of giga-scale companies hold all the cards. The actual technology behind AI is mostly a small set of clever tricks for encoding data in a way that neural nets can work efficiently on, the nets themselves aren't magic and the process of making them is well understood, but unless you have the money to shell out for tens of thousands in hardware and have access to literally everyone's private data to train on you're just going to be very second tier for eternity.

Yes.

The AI/LLM boom has really hurt my interest in developing new programming languages. I worry that even if I come up with a new language that's a significant step forward, the lack of an existing corpus for it would limit the ability of tools like Copilot to work with it, which would discourage adoption.

> The demos just become more cringey, the messaging more duplicitous and fake-authentic.

This part sounds like you are going through a rough patch. Like you are feeling down, not sure why, and are digging around for reasons.

What you are saying is legit. What you are feeling is legit. But, it would be worth doing some deep chill soul-searching to figure out if these really are the reasons. Maybe you need a hike in the woods. Maybe you want a job better mission behind it. Maybe I'm full of shit.

Either way, best to laugh at cringey demos. Learn how to use AI. What is good for and what it's not. Use it or don't. Just build stuff people need either way.

You won't get any sort of heartfelt response here. Talk to her instead.

It feels like the tail end of a culturally stagnant generation. I'm hoping it's potent enough to trigger an aesthetic revival.

I feel it. I imagine it's how someone like David Foster Wallace felt when postmodernism overtook the culture at large and seeped into every nook and cranny.

I have certainly become more of a recluse on the internet. I'm still figuring things out... at this time I think I'll pull more inwards. Do my own thing. Create my own art. Maybe I'll see you on the flip side? Maybe not.

its motivated me, I think the real question is whether the thing you're a builder of is intended to make money. because for making money this has been great.

for trying to do a passion project for accolades on your originality, with money as an afterthought, I can see that seeming more pointless

for an analogy: grocery stores don't need to be original, you can put one right across the street from another and we still need more grocery stores.

I get where you're coming from, though it has me neither excited nor scared. I think interests will just get pushed around a bit, and I feel like we still inherently crave human-created things in one way or another. For example, it used to be cool when someone would make a nice movie of photos of their trip with titles and effects and share it. Now... it takes seconds, is automated, my feed is filled with such "reels", and I don't watch any of them. Instead, that plain, typo-filled but authentic text update catches my eye. Things that highlight personal craft will be demanded. Look to any number of parallels in the physical world.

> If you don't like how the new technology is pulling the rug out from under your reality, it is you who has the problem.

I didn't want to reply to anybody in particular so as to mitigate the provocation since this is HN. But this feels like a common sentiment among transhumanist etc types. Or maybe I'm imagining, but I bet a lot of us are feeling this way so I thought I'd call it out. I have no expectation of receiving any understanding. The future is not for people like us.

I'm not disillusioned I'm just being realistic. As opposed to the Dotcom boom, AI is top down rather than bottom up.

Very few startups are finding success and if they do it's short lived because it gets replaced or integrated natively by newer capabilities from existing major players.

There will be success stories but I haven't seen many novel ideas created using new AI tech that are not just an overlay on top of an LLM that people aren't willing to pay for.

I think the right state of mind is to explore and keep thinking about real world applications, even though at the moment it's basically just every existing saas inserting AI into their existing products.

Something that I've found worth pointing out to other builders is that you don't need to build an AI product outright to sell to consumers (re: your comment about your ideas being gobbled up by big tech). Building internal AI/ML tools to solve your own business/workflow/whatever problems is often the better route for folks to leverage the advances in that technology. The best AI you build is likely the one your users don't even know exists.

This also has a beneficial side effect of showing you first-hand just how bad this tooling is currently and how far away it is from replacing builders wholesale. And to be clear, I'm not just talking about leveraging closed proprietary APIs for these efforts, I'm actually more referring to building your own training and inference stacks from scratch. The pedagogical impact alone can make up most of the ROI for your time spent.

    > The best AI you build is likely the one your users don't even know exists

Not just you. And not just you "going through a rough patch," although there could be some overlap. I think my optimism for the future is cut down a bit by announcements like these, too. That does affect my overall life outlook.

Perhaps I'm just in the same boat - shouldn't be drawing any sort of emotional support from that.

You are forgetting one point about the current AI technology. No creativity. Yes you can ask models to generate music, video, images. But they are rehashing the content of somebody else. Asking to create a video of Michael Jackson dancing at the style of Fred Astaire with music similar to a Metallica song, is rehashing, not creativity. There is nothing in the current GenAI that is not a rehash.

It will stop when they run out of data, or when the training data needs to be isolated from the datasets created by GenAI.

So create something based on human creation. Sell it to the LLM trainers. It's the new business model....

Yes I‘ve had that too big time. Currently it goes better especially since Yann LeCun debunked a lot of the OpenAI AGI fearmongering. There is for example no such thing as general intelligence, people can be orders of magnitude better or worse in certain domains AND it seems AI is just approaching human-level and passing it only a little. Not some kind of magical AGI which can do everything in seconds.

Also related: https://youtu.be/nkdZRBFtqSs

In a world of IKEA, people still perfect the craft of handmade furniture.

In the era of the camera, people kept painting. Some still paint landscapes — others were driven to create new forms of expression.

Poets still exist in the era of tweets, and directors shoot on 35mm in the age of TikTok.

Change is constant — but there's always joy in finding something you love and diving deeply into it.

I'm going back to basics. The other day I've implemented a raycaster (wolf 3d), after that I took a shot at the shunting yard algorithm... I honestly don't give a ff about llms, video and music generation using AI. It's all sad at this point

Wouldn't intelligent AI agents enable average people to build amazing things?

> Maybe it’s me but the advances in AI are just leaving me feeling disillusioned as a builder.

I think we're living a big evolution in tech and as a developer myself I think it will take time to really adopt those tools (and not fear them). For now, to be honest I don't see any big advantage using AI for code generation. However I think today stuff like ChatGPT are great dev rubber ducks. Sometime it helps you think and put you on the right path.

> There’s an odd feeling that whatever I am going to build will just get gobbled away by some big tech company.

I could be wrong but for now we're still in the hype train, AI companies are showing off everything they can to impress and raise as much money as possible (because their own subsistance is based on huge amount of money they're not able to generate by themselves). Don't get me wrong, what they are showing us is extremely impressive. But today I tend to think those tools will give more credit to the builders that will imagine and build apps and tools with something AI eats but doesn't have... Creativity, Taste and Imagination.

I might be a fool to believe that but If I compare that to cooking, even if you have restaurants where that only re-heat stuff that taste good, people still appreciate a good meal prepared with love by a real chef :)

So my only advice here is: be a chef, build what you think makes sense to you, be happy at what you're doing. Learn, try, brake and build but just don't stop doing it.