Ask HN: I just talked to an AI-obsessed client, and I need a shower afterwards

I am dealing with it by walking away from the internet and connected technology as much as possible.

Unfortunately, generally if people can do something, they will. And with AI systems they have been given one of the largest short cuts possible, thus they take it relentlessly. There is no concern for quality so long as it is good enough to benefit them.

They will try to rationalize it but it typically ends up in moral corruption of "If I don't, they will."

It saddens me because I saw the vision of what computers and connected technology could be in the 90's and 2000's, only to see it turn bitter.

I remember reading an essay by Richard Stallman calling all this kind of stuff out in the late 1980's and I kind of hate that he got it so right. In assuming that many will take the power play and the convenience means that this is the path we take.

The more you can walk away form this stuff the better even if you don't want to.

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I've read similar sentiments over the past year, it seems to be a recurring theme.

It's been amazing to participate in a hobby-turned-profession for the last two decades or so. But did we get into it because it was easy? No. Technology, computers, Internet, was a new world, full of excitement, mystery, and exploration. There may have been no immediate ROI in learning how to set up a Geocities site, but it was the gateway to HTML, programming, and eventually led to, what I hope has been, a rewarding career.

The industry isn't being "destroyed" by AI, that started happening with PE and MBAs long before, or maybe it was fucked from the get-go, and we've been very lucky to have had well-paying jobs for typing strange things into a computer. But now that it's easy for the non-tech commoner to do it, we're upset? Fishy NIMBYism something something.

I went through a similar disillusionment phase for a few months as I tried to apply my old thinking to this new era. I had to just let the AI agents own the line-level, function-level, and even class-level responsibilities, while I focused on the file names and writing good prompts. Naming is everything in computer science, as they say.

On personal projects, I'm executing on things that were out of reach before (or required extensive research), like (re)learning hardware, writing RTOS firmware, PCB design, etc. It's my learning PHP3/VB phase, and I love it. What matters now, more than ever, is to have good taste.

Give it time for the mindset shift to happen. Take a break, if you can. You won't miss anything anyway, a few new models, harnesses, and workflows will have appeared, and they take about 5 minutes to understand. So the differentiating factors between you and the next pleb are your fundamentals, good taste, and creativity.

Be like water, etc.

You are almost seeing it. If good taste and creativity is the new seperator then please tell me since when was that the strength of programmers?

That's what's scary isn't it?

There are people with more good taste and creativity than you.They actually built careers with it.

And that's who you need to catch up to now.

Or you can dig I guess and be an artisinal programmer. There's honour in that ,I hear. Just no paycheck.

Some skills are impressive, hard to learn and take years or decades to master but are essentially worthless in a monetary sense. Just yesterday I witnessed a musician masterfully playing a beautiful piece on the accordion. Only he wasn't playing in a great music hall, he was in a busy subway station hoping to collect a few coins from passersby. I assume he mostly did it for the love of the game, while he could have made more money delivering food or sorting boxes at Amazon.

That got me thinking that programming might be like that in the near future, it's still an impressive skill for a human to learn and master and it takes tremendous effort and the craft itself is beautiful, but economically it will just not matter anymore. And in the same way as the music industry today is bigger than it ever was and there's tremendous money in it but 95-99 % of highly talented musicians will never earn a decent wage with it, the software industry will be bigger than it ever was but the money will be highly concentrated in the hands of a few players. Maybe we will still have some rockstar programmers than can masterfully command legions of agents or that win the love of the crowd for their unique work, but most of us will be enjoying this craft as a creative hobby and will do other things for a living.

Then again, coming back to the music parable, for a long time "amateurs" can make music with software tools without having any talent or even knowing musical notation or anything about tempo. Does that make them musicians? So take solace in the fact that these people aren't programmers and never will be, they're just pushing buttons on a synth board watching the "music" that comes out.

This can’t go on, so it won’t. The 20s will be looked back at as a really awful time except for the ultra rich. Wait and watch and give actual people a chance, humans are better than this, but we’ve gotta develop antibodies to this new strain of leech.

Your client sounds like a prick of a person - I hope you find better clients!

It is good for them TBH. I don’t think there is anyway to stop that, and they do genuinely feel good so it’s kinda fine for me.

I have learned to cope with AI tools at work, but use it scarcely, and went back to books and hand-coding if I really want to learn something because that’s the only way that makes the knowledge stays in my brain a bit longer.

I did lose some interests in programming in general, but AI is just a part of the reason —- most of it is because I don’t have good mental health —- and AI is part of the reason triggering anxiety.

Every industry goes through a cycle of birth, explosion of creativity, enormous profitability, followed by consolidation and a small corporate class, and a large hobby class.

A time ago, sewing and tailoring was a valuable skill. Cheap clothes made it unnecessary. Today sewing is a hobby and most people who sew do so at a lower quality than a machine. You can say the same about pottery and ceramics.

There was a time when there were hundreds of car companies. Folks who wanted to could build a car, or plane, from scratch. That's not possible anymore.

Today lots of people cook at home at a level far superior to (at least) fast food restaurants. But of course fast food still exists.

I have been lucky to spend my career at the birth of the industry. It is now moving into the next stage, the commoditization of the skill set. I've seen the industry change before though, this is just the next cycle of that.

Lots of people will make a lot of software for themselves. But they won't sell it. Lots of other people will buy software because programming (ai or not) won't interest them. Programming isn't the skill here. Everything else in the business is.

The cost of producing code has dropped to almost zero, but the cost of knowing whether that code is actually useful hasn't.

I think the same is true for images, videos, and music. The cost of producing content is approaching zero, but taste, originality, judgment, and intent still matter.

In a world where anyone can create almost anything, having good taste could become increasingly important.

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> I managed to convince my parents to get AOL when I was 12. I made a Geocities site at 14.

> they get to feel creative for possibly the first time ever.

They're experiencing what you experienced at 14. And, no offense, your Geocities site that you made at 14 was probably not very good.

Now, there is still a difference, because people had to deliberately go to your site, and what this guy is doing is more like polluting a commons. That is a problem. AI makes it much more of a problem, because it becomes much easier to spew lies (or just slop).

I think what's going to happen is that we're going to develop better slop senses (eventually). There will be a return of gatekeepers, because keeping slop and lies out will be more valuable than letting new things in.

For that there's Python: with 30 lines you can automate this task. If you want I can send you the script I use. DM me if interested.

Master painters hated the first cameras. It was not considered art. People who use a DAW in their bedrooms aren't considered musicians by the classically trained. But think of the importance of Earthrise by William Anders. Or even Skrillex. He may not be your cup of tea, but he got paid (net worth estimated to be $70 million).

Each advance in technology lowers the threshold of entry into any hobby or profession. And the people who "paid the price" or "did it the hard way" resent people who find a way to crowd in without all the suffering and sacrifice. It's a very valid feeling. It won't stop innovation, however. We're just stuck in the middle of the transition phase and it's going to be a bumpy ride.

What is the response here to finding out the plans of reply with agents and post as agents? If we do nothing the flood of AI posts will overwhelm the internet. But doing something seems impossible too.

Mainly by being unemployed for the last 8 months

I have an ipad and it came with Garage Band to create music. I toyed around with that a little. I think thats like with AI - people will play around with it, figure some things out but do they have the interest and time to take on all the work involved with something like a restaurant management app? I certainly am not interested enough to become a music producer, nor do I have enough taste to know if something is good. There's an entire process to getting music produced that I'm ignorant of. People can generate toy apps or websites with AI all they want ... back in the dot com days people could create HTML sites from MS Word (it was disgusting output). They have no interest in maintaining, patching, troubleshooting, and scaling any of these toy apps. Sure they could get AI to do that too - can they check that AI is doing it correctly? what about when it fails?

I think the thing that humans are going to find is AI has no taste. Its the statistical median/average of solutions. AI slop is going to become prevalent and people are probably not going to like it after the hype fades. Part of the human experience is connecting with other humans, even if its following a band, or artist, etc. Things created by AI don't have that human experience element.

I have/am having many adjacent experiences, and after having all of my angst and rage and confusion at a particlarly horrible techno cluster fuck, waved away by a pretty barista, we remain flirtatious, I kept comming back to the moment she brought me back, and realised that what I was suffering was much worse than and ordinary or extrodinary personal issue with technology, what I am working through is a complete loss of faith, that was so fundamental to my bieng that I didnt see it, raised by scientists, and academics,medical people, and engineers, part of the first generation to have computers in grade school an early adopter of everything and quite certain of my ability to understand and control the technology around me, to finding that the presets are non optional, and the twits think mightily of themselves for standing in front of things taking selfies of the acomplishments. still not as bad as soul, gospel and bluesman I know who has to be nice while rando's force him to listen to the 'music' the song they made with ai. so back to the girl who brought me back, to our still overarching analog reality, and that I am working very hard to excell in and am delegating or ignoring most of the internet,even better now that I have java script,dom storage and all images dissabled. physical things, a couple of dreadnought acoustic guitars strung with 13's, bushwacking with no device, hard work, good food, no fucks to give about technology or what people think

sound vaugely familiar?

IMO you need to pivot to higher-end software as the low-end cheap stuff is going to be gobbled up by vibe-coders

(Tree was full of apples before, easy to grab, and no one even knew it. Later we started to jump, climb and find new ways that was progressive and very exciting. All a sudden they figure out the tree that was already running out of apples, so what. Find a new one that requires tools/skills not much people has and still valuable, it is much harder to say but you are already one of the people who can and should. Your 12 year old of your self used curiosity, passion, what ever the motive is still there, just kick start it again, find your new AOL, do your first new Geocities level project that matches today's tech.That means imo it is time for you to train your first llm, dig into how inference works. Or write your first arduboy game for fun. The new challenging stuff that they can not touch any time soon hopefully that will trigger back your curiosity and passion. Best of luck! My 2 cents.)

I agree. A lower barrier entry at a significant cost to society.

I wish there was a way to metric creativity, strategy and effort.

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I have worked professionally in programming for about 35 years, and before that, I was part of the demoscene. As I see it, the programming profession has evolved multiple times throughout my career. Things have continuously been abstracted into new layers, but the shift has never been as fundamental as it is today with AI.

What is happening now is that we are essentially abstracting away the entire coding layer, and partly even architecture and technology all at once (we aren't quite there yet, but we will be soon). What hasn't changed, and never will, is the human vision, the ideas of how new, innovative software (rather than just a clone) should be structured and how it should function.

I believe this shift is highly democratizing. It means teenagers can build cool new games, and financial minds can create the next great finance app. The hard part is no longer the programming itself; it is the software craftsmanship. It is about building an innovative and genuinely useful product, rather than just writing complex code (an identity we programmers have clung to for a long time). We have transitioned from being mere coders to true developers.

I also hope that young people today get the same opportunity to connect with software development as we did back in the Commodore 64 era. Only today, it isn't about squeezing every last drop of performance out of limited hardware, it is about bringing something truly useful or fun straight from your imagination into reality.

I just talked to an AI-obsessed client...

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> How are you all dealing with this?

I'm learning a very niche trade. It involves using my hands. Very artistic. Very, very difficult to master. I don't think AI will be able to do it, at least not until they have humanoid bodies and are able to move exactly like us.

The web is trash. I hate it now. Let the power grid collapse. These trillion dollar companies instantly become worthless.