Was the pleasure of writing code that the author describes tied to the actual practice or its profits?
My impression is that many white collar workers felt that their jobs and accompanying status were immutable. They’re not. Couldn’t they have seen this coming?
Nothing prevents people from continuing on with their trades or interests how they did before the AI bubble bloomed. But if they want to earn a living doing it, I guess they need to start thinking outside of the box. I believe prolonged contact with insulation induces hive breakout.
The internet evolved as programming became a sought after path. But with the internet, a irreversible change happened in our society. Old facts are being questioned and it is imho just a matter of time until they materialize „in the real world“. This might include questions of status, achievement, the idea of self worth and the role of work.
We should not insist to measure new things with old rulers.
Maybe this is a neurodivergent thing, but I have, as long as I can remember, always had the following progression in my mind: "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?" and I'd continue a few times seeking the "larger problem, the more basic problem being solved" that whatever I was doing "really is". That "basic problem" was "communicating" far more frequently than I expected, and that "communicating" was often just translating between things, people and software, or people and people, or software and software. But it's almost always communicating.
I often find myself asking the same pair of questions "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?", and it usually leads to "this is nonesense, it's paying civilizational debt based on a series of decisions that thousands of people made with no clue of where it would lead". Which then is usually followed with "what should you be doing?"...which depending on the day usually ends up being half-jokingly: "I should be living in a small community far from capitalistic excess."
I sometimes identify as "ex-programmer" these days, just because whatever coding i could do is now irrelevant due to LLMs, but this isn't entirely honest. Programming was never my job. My job was "convincing people to transfer money to my account under various pretexts, most of which involved me writing some code", and as such, the thing is pretty much alive.
> For myself, in the last 10 years, my work of writing code has largely defined what I do with my working time. Now I experience large swaths of that work being created and done by AI (sometimes amazingly well, sometimes poorly), and I find myself thinking of the photographer above.
Which is ironic, because smartphone photography is astonishingly average to someone who actually understands photography. Phones try to handle every scenario for the user. It has been optimized for bright outdoors, low light conditions, even specific stuff like sunsets. So most people never realize how difficult it really is to shoot in bright daylight with the light source behind the subject. Only when you pick up a traditional camera do you realize that’s one of the worst conditions to take a photo in.
Maybe coding is headed toward the same place. AI coding will smooth out complexity for the majority of programmers, but at the same time, we’ll also see a lot of programmers building things that don’t actually need to be built, or not realizing the limits of their solutions, or just hung in the narrow space of what AI can do for them.
Having done photography with Sony-a6000, I’ve found that it made me more skilled with a smartphone camera. So, I am still optimistic that knowledge gained through deliberate effort has value, even in a world that increasingly prizes “effortlessness” in everything. But only time will tell how much that belief really holds up.
I can relate. It is important to meet this head-on, and not gloss over it, explain it away, or shame people for feeling this way.
I even feel this about the wargame "Warmachine", where in the past you could not measure distance before committing to actions. Deciding if model A and B were 10" or 14" apart was a critical skill, and called "weaponized geometry". I was good at it. The game has changed, and you can now measure to your hearts content, making this skill basically pointless. I still feel a tiny bit conflicted about it.
Dublin in the Rare Old Times - The Dubliners
Like my house that fell to progress//My trade's a memory
The effort is up to you on your own time. I have an e-bike and a regular bike. The regular bike gets way more use because I prefer the satisfaction I get from it.
Also, speaking as someone that uses LLMs every day, they take effort! They cannot spin straw into gold. The terrible work I see coming from AI is usually from someone who doesn’t realize that.
Following Karl Popper's thinking on this topic, I'd say that our problems define us, and when we solve our problems we often discover new and interesting children problems demanding attention. “The best thing that can happen to a human being us to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.” — Karl Popper
We are a cerebellum. Our brain summarizes one layer of data into insights for the layer above that and programming is one layer. AI is now forcing us to think not how things should be built but what should we built - everyone is a promoted to product manager. What should be built now can be answered by what is needed by humans, or companies, or AI, or government. All of the above should be serving humans. So what do people want or need? How can we harness AI to solve more needs.
I think of it from another angle. AI is reaching an energy limit. Companies are way overvalued and in a race to spend most of their gains on AI and that may end badly. Governments are on edge and conflict is brewing. All of that and unknown unknowns can put a stop on the amazing stream of affordable AI we have now. I am using the models as fast as possible to build things I find meaningful and to learn as much as possible. Having unlimited help with any idea that I come up with is incredible. It’s akin to infinite VC funding, but you don’t owe equity or a cent back. The world is now what your cerebellum can come up with. And what you know about the needs of people.
>If our efforts, in part, define us, then our efforts have intrinsic value. What happens when something we enjoy doing that took effort becomes effortless? And what happens if that original effort was a foundation on which we saw value in ourselves?
I found the flaw.
Effort is the process of converting energy into value (the state of something being effortless in the future). It's not the efforts themselves that have intrinsic value, but the work ethic that drove the effort in the first place.
This was written by a dev so it has the usual hallmarks of ascribing some anecdote to a generalized statement about people, their life’s purpose and so on. Take it with a grain of salt.
At some point -- sometimes early, often too late -- we realize we're going to die. Our time is finite. We have only so many days to do anything, let alone something that matters.
Meaning is found in how and why we spend that time.
When we're fooled into believing money matters more than time, we trade far too much of the latter for the former. Worse, we can mistake the monetary value of our time for its actual value, and then optimize our entire lives according to that myth.
The idea that AI destroys meaning is a false framing. Many people are already experiencing a meaning crisis, and AI is simply an easy scapegoat.
Purpose comes from discovering our own values through living, not from accepting meanings imposed by others.
As others have mentioned, LLMs require a lot of effort to get it right. Personally, I still prefer writing code over writing LLM prompts but I’m trying to find the right balance. I will always enjoy refactoring so I tend to have the LLM get me most of the way there and leave the polishing for myself.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 65.8 ms ] threadMy impression is that many white collar workers felt that their jobs and accompanying status were immutable. They’re not. Couldn’t they have seen this coming?
Nothing prevents people from continuing on with their trades or interests how they did before the AI bubble bloomed. But if they want to earn a living doing it, I guess they need to start thinking outside of the box. I believe prolonged contact with insulation induces hive breakout.
I treat my coding as a craft. That has become much easier, since retiring.
I'm quite aware that doing things my way isn't commercially viable, but no one pays me to do it. I do it for myself.
That said, I find that it's important to always be challenging myself[0].
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...
We should not insist to measure new things with old rulers.
I’m not a programmer because I wanted to program.
Thus AI is incredibly exciting to me because it makes it easier to make computers do things.
Which is ironic, because smartphone photography is astonishingly average to someone who actually understands photography. Phones try to handle every scenario for the user. It has been optimized for bright outdoors, low light conditions, even specific stuff like sunsets. So most people never realize how difficult it really is to shoot in bright daylight with the light source behind the subject. Only when you pick up a traditional camera do you realize that’s one of the worst conditions to take a photo in.
Maybe coding is headed toward the same place. AI coding will smooth out complexity for the majority of programmers, but at the same time, we’ll also see a lot of programmers building things that don’t actually need to be built, or not realizing the limits of their solutions, or just hung in the narrow space of what AI can do for them.
Having done photography with Sony-a6000, I’ve found that it made me more skilled with a smartphone camera. So, I am still optimistic that knowledge gained through deliberate effort has value, even in a world that increasingly prizes “effortlessness” in everything. But only time will tell how much that belief really holds up.
I even feel this about the wargame "Warmachine", where in the past you could not measure distance before committing to actions. Deciding if model A and B were 10" or 14" apart was a critical skill, and called "weaponized geometry". I was good at it. The game has changed, and you can now measure to your hearts content, making this skill basically pointless. I still feel a tiny bit conflicted about it.
Dublin in the Rare Old Times - The Dubliners
Like my house that fell to progress//My trade's a memory
Antoine de Saint Exupéry (author of The Little Prince), in Citadelle
By definition this is instrumental value rather than intrinsic value.
Also, speaking as someone that uses LLMs every day, they take effort! They cannot spin straw into gold. The terrible work I see coming from AI is usually from someone who doesn’t realize that.
Be careful that you aren't optimizing your life in response to someone else's marketing campaign.
I think of it from another angle. AI is reaching an energy limit. Companies are way overvalued and in a race to spend most of their gains on AI and that may end badly. Governments are on edge and conflict is brewing. All of that and unknown unknowns can put a stop on the amazing stream of affordable AI we have now. I am using the models as fast as possible to build things I find meaningful and to learn as much as possible. Having unlimited help with any idea that I come up with is incredible. It’s akin to infinite VC funding, but you don’t owe equity or a cent back. The world is now what your cerebellum can come up with. And what you know about the needs of people.
I found the flaw.
Effort is the process of converting energy into value (the state of something being effortless in the future). It's not the efforts themselves that have intrinsic value, but the work ethic that drove the effort in the first place.
Meaning is found in how and why we spend that time.
When we're fooled into believing money matters more than time, we trade far too much of the latter for the former. Worse, we can mistake the monetary value of our time for its actual value, and then optimize our entire lives according to that myth.
The idea that AI destroys meaning is a false framing. Many people are already experiencing a meaning crisis, and AI is simply an easy scapegoat.
Purpose comes from discovering our own values through living, not from accepting meanings imposed by others.