Why does it make you sad? Twitter as a concept is a technically superior platform to keep up with news about interesting things you like. Short-form, multimedia integrated, your own curated timeline. It is literally the perfect platform for following artists, musicians, game developers, programmers, whatever, and seeing what they're up to, vs. trying to follow 100 blogs. Unlike RSS, it is interactive, allowing people to communicate and form connections, and the entire "retweet" thing makes people creating cool things immensely more discoverable, allowing more eyes to see their cool work.
Obviously it has been degraded by the switch to algorithm over user curation of their own timeline, literally everything Musk did to it, etc, but old Twitter was good, hence the desire to "go back".
While "for everything there is a season" is my preferred approach to tech hype cycles this one does _feel_ different. While you could broadly ignore say blockchain and the crypto hype and not really miss much of value; I do think there's a fundamental shift happening as of this year.
If model progress completely froze here what does that future look like? Chinese labs would continue to bring down the cost of what we have and a lot of companies would lose a lot of money on data center buildout but does software as an industry ever close Pandora's box?
As much as I'm loathe to use it and think criticisms about a loss of capability, quality and skill are valid I also think for the majority of software jobs as-was will remain changed for good. There was always a struggle between 'cheap and quick' offshoring and actual quality software but I don't think the author is necessary overreacting by feeling unsettled.
I do think a lot of startups, especially on HN, are in for a reckoning that your new vibecoded product/service or one with an AI feature or two added will survive. Everything you do is going to feed the model, that's the training data now. That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.
I've been thinking a lot about this. Many technical barriers that could justify businesses are much lower now, so we are left with other kinds of barriers: red tape, regulatory, legal, etc. If you have access to go past those barriers, you are worth something. If all you do is provide a technical solution, you are probably going to stop making sense.
In a way its worse- nothing is stopping claude from decompiling all the things- and then adding the source code it decompiled to the training data, as if it was just another github to crawl. So if one of your installers is out there- you have provided the perfect example of something working.
You think all companies are going to vibe code and then vibe maintain for years and years all the software they require to do a business that has nothing to do with software? And you think the LLM is going to do it itself?
I fully acknowledge this is a mess right now, but vibe-fixing or vibe-rebuiliding-from-scratch is only going to get better.
More realistically, I think other companies will vibe code and sell these solutions, but the cheapness of building will drive down costs so much that it'll be effectively the same result.
For most yes, but the art of picking the right features that interact in the right way is still a delicate craft. AI is like a sledgehammer. It can demolish technical challenges and it can follow patterns but is still completely blind to the "why".
But yeah the majority of startups don't have well thought out reasoning either. In the end, there's no substitute for hard work. AI can reduce the iteration time maybe.
> the art of picking the right features that interact in the right way is still a delicate craft.
It is.
But after you expend the human-in-the-loop effort to build the right software with the right features using your impeccable judgement, what is going to stop your would-be customer from telling an LLM to analyze your solution and reproduce it for a couple tens of dollars in tokens instead of paying you?
Opportunity cost. AI can help with maintenance but do you want to be on the hook for a service or would you rather pay a monthly fee and have someone else bear the responsibility?
Also most of the software that's really successful has some sort of lock in or network effect. The code is not the only valuable service being provided. To wit, there exist open source off the shelf solutions for hosting your own ridesharing, chat services, social networks, internet search, etc. Why isn't anyone pointing agents at those projects to spruce them up and run them? The network is what's valuable.
I mean we already live in a world where extremely valuable software exists right in the open for free. The actual artifact of code is in abundant supply and does not have a very high price. AI can't bring the price down lower than free.
Sure, there are some network-effect focused bits of software that have such moats, but they are a vanishingly small amount of all produced software and all the ones you mentioned already have locked-in incumbents.
How often does a new Uber/Twitter/Google type of service come around? How much of a sustainable tech economy is it when you have to be that level of unicorn just to not get LLM-washed away?
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
You may currently have enough technical knowledge about computers and services to collaborate with a customer better than either of you working alone.
Thinking back to a previous discussion, a veterinary clinic likely does know better than you what they need in their CRM, but they may wildly overestimate the hardware required to do that and just accept the first thing Claude comes up with that's scaled for a city hospital with 4000 beds occupied at any given time, when they're actually just one person in a village with 100 pets.
The main reason Claude is "cheap" because it has to compete with OpenAI, Deepseek, GLM, Qwen, Muse (who is also massively subsidised their model to get training data), etc. If they increased prices 10x, people would instantly jump ship to the next competitor. There's no moat for Anthropic either, short of constantly training new models in a red queen's race.
If I imagine this as a winner takes all markets are big corporations safe? If you replace all your human labour with a service from a big AI monopoly what leverage do you have when they tell you hey btw your tokens are going up 20% next year? Will it be easier to negotiate with 30k disorganised employees or one of the richest companies the world has ever seen?
AI feels like it’s happening to people where as the internet felt like people were making it happen.
This is a result of the technology being expensive and centralized vs cheap and decentralized. The marketing claiming it’s aggressive and takes from humans vs uplifting and enriching. And on and on
It makes it really clear what the right thing to do is, make the technology widely available, cheap and let humanity do its thing.
> Seriously, if you ever thought Gen Z doesn't drink,
They drink less, which has been documented extensively. The fact they are asking about intensity is a sign of this, not evidence to the contrary. This is a good thing, imo.
why this is a good thing?
alcohol it's not the only thing people throwning their lifes. As for myself, Gen Z member, I'm never drinked at all, but this doesn't mean my life or even health is better.
Interesting perspective. For those tracking real AI adoption data by profession, channely.co has been collecting metrics that show the human+AI hybrid model is clearly the current winner.
We got the computer from Star Trek TNG 400 years earlier than we were supposed to and everyone is complaining about it. I wanted to live long enough to have that computer, and I'm happy I get to use it now.
I don't know what else to say about it, except that I'm sorry that you think social media was good before AI came along, but the truth is that it has always been crap and was ruined by humans a decade before all of this came along. It wasn't a chat bot that was harassing Ariel Waldmen on Twitter in 2007 and it wasn't a chat bot that refused to do anything about it. If you want to treat humans as important as AI, start by allowing them to take responsibility for their failures. Twitter has always been a toxic garbage dump that feeds on narcissism and slot machine dopamine mechanics.
I feel the same way. I was trying out the new ChatGPT voice the other day and had this exact same thought. AI _still_ is blowing my mind often, even though it's been around for years.
it really hurts me heart. I love programming, I feel like myself when I write code. wrestling with a problem until I understand every nuance and how to defeat it is the clearest most unalloyed joy I feel.
A shameless plug, but it is exactly why I made developerpoetry site. I feel sad about the time that has passed and never it will be as it used to be. Sometimes writing something makes it better.
3rd year undergrad at Georgia Tech is going to make $500k starting salary at OpenAI if he just vibe codes a couple apps for his LinkedIn, but has foregone this for philosophical/emotional reasons
It hurts my heart too :) I thought it was something I had to push through, I was wrong.
I notice a lot more people moving to a career where they manage, as opposed to do the programming. I see why.
I'm slowly phasing out of my software role, I don't even have that much experience yet. I just cannot sit behind a PC for 40 hrs a week talking to a chat bot. I would rather do something useful with the time i've been given.
> If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?
I don’t think there’s enough reporting or discussing on the existential crisis that is happening in the first world as a result of accessibility of AI technologies.
As part of my job I host conversations specifically around this, I had a long dinner last night with a diverse group of congressional staffers, engineers, lawyers and managers at the wharf in Washington DC.
I also just got back from Africa and the Middle East talking with student students and educators as well as businessman across those regions.
What’s clear to me is that all of the consistent complaints about AI have nothing to do with AI as a technology. This isn’t new, it’s the history of technological revolution.
To a person, every complaint has to do with the intersection of commerce, government and social structure - and more specifically the management and identification of externalities.
So almost all of the argumentation and debaters are talking past each other
Extremely “pro” AI people talk about all of the real documented progresss but downplaying the risks and challenges and externalities. This is how every revolutionary technology (ICE, spinning jenny, steam engine, etc…) was sold and we live in that.
On the other side the people who are “anti-AI” almost exclusively talk about externalities and never talk about any benefits and any benefits that they do acknowledge are either “not AI” because they aren’t explicitly only LLMs or corrupted by the externalities themselves.
The challenge is both sides are correct in part but they can’t communicate with each other other.
Well the interesting thing about your proposal is that at least one of the people at the dinner suggested ban all generative AI
Notably the corporate side of AI development is very deeply involved in politics and so my question boils down to “where is the alternative political coordination happening?”
But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.
Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.
It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.
AI has confronted me with the reality of some of my ideas.
I've wanted to build something rather specific for a long time.
With AI i'm close to release, but had AI not come along it would not have happened for at least another 5 or 10 years depending on what life throws in my way.
There's an initial AI mania stage. It's when someone starts using AI to code and they come to think that they now have superpowers (and to some extent they do). I certainly had that mania and to some extent still do. There's a frenzy of working on 3 or 4 projects at once that's exhilarating. Even right now I've got Claude working on a couple of different projects and GLM-5.3-flash working on another. But I have to wonder how much of this stuff I'm co-creating with AI will actually get used.
That's the thing. There's no point in sharing most of the results anymore. When and if someone needs a version of this, they will likely need it to be slightly different. By then the model will have trained on your session and be a bit better in general.
They will just prompt their own version into existence without any obvious heritage to yours.
I've already seen this a few times already. For example, someone on r/locallama vibecoded some feature for llama.cpp. When people asked if they had submitted the PR to llama.cpp because they wanted the same feature, the poster replied that it had been vibe coded and llama.cpp doesn't accept vibe coded PRs so, no, they did not intend to submit a PR.
Kinda sounds like the problem there is that llama.cpp has decided it doesn't want any of the ideas of its users that they build on top of it. If I built a feature that solves my problem, I'm not going to completely redo it from scratch by hand just to make a PR. There's a lot of stuff that would be valuable to build that doesn't because people who have the idea don't have the time/energy/etc to pursue it. Now they have an assistant they can delegate to and have the energy, but only because of the assistant being able to take on large portion of the work in the area they're not as expert in.
So if you reject projects largely coded by supervised AI, then you simply won't get any of the value from them.
In a sense, all these features and ideas etc were always things that could have existed, but before they sat in the fog of the invisible, and now you get to see many more of them and it can be frustrating. But in a no-LLM world we weren't going to get those features and products anyway.
I wonder if the next addicting tech will be AI mania like you described. Rather than folks watching videos picked by the algorithm as a kind of addiction, folks will be "building" all day addicted to making things with AI. In the AI silo you're a super genius as it eggs you on to keep building
On the surface that seems like the case, but after going through a situation similar to what GP described I'm not sure that's the case.
It's like everyone is fighting for your attention. One argues that an educational video is what you should watch. Another argues that building some piece of software you could easily pay a $1-$10 but now custom built for you is a better use of your time.
Also there's the lottery aspect. Where you use Claude thinking that something you build may strike gold. So it becomes like one big addicting lottery ticket for builders.
I, and I'm pretty sure I share this impression with many of you, would feel a whole lot more optimistic about AI for software engineering (which truly has been transformational) if it didn't come with layoffs or the promise of layoffs.
A sad realization I've had is that even though we can create so much with the help of AI, what we're creating isn't the same as what it was before AI, even if the artifact is exactly the same.
Like immagine 200 years ago being able to produce a photorealistic depiction of a scene. Then, it would command you a reputation, a salary, you would have cultural prowess attached to your work, it would generate a legacy for yourself, etc.
Before AI, any cool project would give back so much more than after AI: experience, a following, a community coming around your project which could increase your social capital. It would even give you momentum, spending a long time working on something which would mark you as someone who works on that type of thing, which could lead you to interesting places.
Nowadays, these fleeting project ideas that you can grind out with AI have the effect of children's art projects: you feel a sense of pride at what you made, you like the way it looks, you may hang it somewhere, but no one else really cares, or if they do care, it's not for long.
> As sure as I know anything, I know what it sounds like. It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity.
I don't doubt this is genuine, but I think it points at a broader rift in engineering where what some consider the craft differs: expressing your craft in hand written code or expressing your craft in making software. I lean heavily towards the latter, which means I have the opposite experience as the OP. My creativity has exploded with AI. I feel my craft has expanded into areas that were previously prohibited by time - whether thats actual typing or doing manual research on SO or Google. My control feels improved because my mind is freed to focus more on my vision.
I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way. It doesn't lessen or make the feelings of others no less legitimate. I just think perhaps there's a communication rift where each side isn't necessarily understanding where the other is coming from. As with most things, understanding and nuance is necessary here.
Very good point. I too feel that these tools have made creation far more accessible. I’ve always been a person who’s been strong at assembling existing pieces into something, but at the same time not great at making the pieces.
It’s liberating, as you say, but at the same time I feel guilt for building when I know I’m really standing on the shoulders of giants, maybe undeservedly.
> If I added a few vibecoded projects to my resume, the gaping maw of every startup, enterprise company, and FAANG behemoth would open to me.
I don't know how true this is. I've got a handful of vibe-coded projects that are quite interesting to me, but the project that is by far the most interesting to talk about (and most impressive) is the one that I did back in 2021 before I ever used an LLM.
The common wisdom in this industry is that ideas are cheap, and if that's still true, there's now a pretty high bar for a vibe-coded project to be considered impressive. You need to either execute to an unusually high level of polish, or be building in a space where even having an idea would require a high level of experience.
Of course, I might be wrong. Maybe all these vibe-coded projects really are recruitment fodder?
> I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier.
I used to think that. I came to the realization that I could have technically built Facebook the product, but would never in a million years have built Facebook the company. But having just finished "Careless People" I feel kinda good about that.
I also just got back from a vacation to Alaska. Lots of gold rush stories from Skagway. One of my favorites was a lady who became massively wealthy by starting baking apple pies for the gold rushers. The classic "sell the shovel" story we hear. And one that also tells me not to lament not being first.
I see people who chased that with crypto or whatever hot trend. None of them struck it rich and feel burned out and have little to show for it. But instead to focus on your values and delivering value. Explorers at the time were suffering scurvy from too much canned and salted food so a pie served not just the soul but the body. She didn't have to be there first even.
I also think that the person I am today might not have even had the skills or gotten into the industry if it were 5 or 10 years earlier. It's the mighty ducks "a half inch and it would have gone in" but a half inch in the other direction could have also completely whiffed it.
I actually thought of this song while writing the post. I was definitely feeling my hubris at that moment, but I would at least liked to have given it a try in 2020-2022, when WebAssembly/Rust on the web was getting good and we were all stuck inside.
as long as there are things in and our lives to improve, there are opportunities to build great companies that provide a lot of value
i dont think those exist purely in software anymore- but if you look around at say, the skyrocketing number of elderly and nursing homes (just as an example) there are probably dozens of ways to improve lives and make a good living there
and electronics and hardware has always been so difficult and expensive to get into- but with new infra and workflows and 3d Printing and getting stuff from China- it's vastly cheaper and easier to do a robotics or hardware startup than 20 years ago
Yeah. 5-10 years? I estimate I was born 20-25 years before the author (based the about page, not sure how current it is). Yes, there was more opportunity for passionate software geeks because normies were still learning about the internets and the eternal september was just starting to cross the chasm from universities to, you know, the rest of the world. So there was more low-hanging fruit, and the common conception of "success" was much lower ($150k was a massive salary! $10M was a great exit!), but to actually achieve breakout success on the scale that I suspect this person is imagining, always required a level understanding human behavior and ruthless business acumen that most geeks just don't have. I also think AI benefits technically-minded, details-oriented people much more than anyone else. So basically if you would have been a formidable founder born 10 years earlier, I believe you can still be a formidable founder now.
I started a company right at the cusp of AI coding taking off, and mostly agree. But...
I think there is still something to be said about how subtly different it is to live in a world where software capability is so ubiquitous, and that was previously your competitive edge. Mark Zuckerberg does not strike me as a naturally "salesy" person, he was a really good builder who struck gold, and nobody - not even Google, with billions more and way more people - was able to catch up with him. A lot of his leverage, for a long time, was basically being the guy who could make a world-class website. That's what gave him the cushion to grow into someone who could give a keynote product demo.
When I first started my company it was still hard to build anything to do with SaaS infra. That was an enormous benefit to me because I knew how to do some things that very few other people could do, even though I had no track record or experience doing most other things involved in running a business. It didn't work out as well for me as it did Mark, but it gave me the same kind of on-ramp and credibility to get at least a little capable at non-builder work.
Personally, I am sad that it's already much harder for someone follow their curiosity/interests and go out and learn things, and be able and willing to spend a lot of time building software, and be equally as rewarded for that. Now that only exists if you know extremely proprietary cutting-edge, capital-intensive AI/hardware secrets and maybe even that will evaporate in short order.
It's not that it's "better" for knowledge workers to have a certain level of authority or leverage than others, but that there is a particular kind of person - someone like me - who will no longer be as valuable, or respected, or influential as they were before. Sometimes, changes like that are good, but it's very hard for me to believe that the technology industry is better off being run by people who aren't in it for the love of the game. At the very least, it's not a good feeling to know that people with shared values, and a similar way of thinking as you, are waning in number and influence.
> It sounds like people around me are throwing themselves at the machine, volunteering to make themselves obsolete
As a programmer, I cannot let myself be sad for that. Because making other people jobs’ obsolete has been our bread and butter since the beginning of the field.
As a human being, I cannot watch myself in the mirror loathing about the consequences of stuff I have happily inflicted to so many others, without feeling cynical and egoistic.
I don’t know the answer regarding what to do, besides investing and hoping for policies that would make people standard of living mostly independent from their job *if* we all become redundant.
a) scale matters, b) we don’t think up justifications for actions that don’t violate our principles— we do it to absolve ourselves from doing it anyway.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 9.5 ms ] threadWanting to use Twitter makes me sad.
Obviously it has been degraded by the switch to algorithm over user curation of their own timeline, literally everything Musk did to it, etc, but old Twitter was good, hence the desire to "go back".
This phase will last like 2 years max I am guessing. What is it with all the linear extrapolation of AI progress these days?
If model progress completely froze here what does that future look like? Chinese labs would continue to bring down the cost of what we have and a lot of companies would lose a lot of money on data center buildout but does software as an industry ever close Pandora's box?
As much as I'm loathe to use it and think criticisms about a loss of capability, quality and skill are valid I also think for the majority of software jobs as-was will remain changed for good. There was always a struggle between 'cheap and quick' offshoring and actual quality software but I don't think the author is necessary overreacting by feeling unsettled.
You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.
I fully acknowledge this is a mess right now, but vibe-fixing or vibe-rebuiliding-from-scratch is only going to get better.
More realistically, I think other companies will vibe code and sell these solutions, but the cheapness of building will drive down costs so much that it'll be effectively the same result.
But yeah the majority of startups don't have well thought out reasoning either. In the end, there's no substitute for hard work. AI can reduce the iteration time maybe.
It is.
But after you expend the human-in-the-loop effort to build the right software with the right features using your impeccable judgement, what is going to stop your would-be customer from telling an LLM to analyze your solution and reproduce it for a couple tens of dollars in tokens instead of paying you?
Also most of the software that's really successful has some sort of lock in or network effect. The code is not the only valuable service being provided. To wit, there exist open source off the shelf solutions for hosting your own ridesharing, chat services, social networks, internet search, etc. Why isn't anyone pointing agents at those projects to spruce them up and run them? The network is what's valuable.
I mean we already live in a world where extremely valuable software exists right in the open for free. The actual artifact of code is in abundant supply and does not have a very high price. AI can't bring the price down lower than free.
How often does a new Uber/Twitter/Google type of service come around? How much of a sustainable tech economy is it when you have to be that level of unicorn just to not get LLM-washed away?
> That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
That's probably the competition, and
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
You may currently have enough technical knowledge about computers and services to collaborate with a customer better than either of you working alone.
Thinking back to a previous discussion, a veterinary clinic likely does know better than you what they need in their CRM, but they may wildly overestimate the hardware required to do that and just accept the first thing Claude comes up with that's scaled for a city hospital with 4000 beds occupied at any given time, when they're actually just one person in a village with 100 pets.
Or the other way around, which is even worse.
The main reason Claude is "cheap" because it has to compete with OpenAI, Deepseek, GLM, Qwen, Muse (who is also massively subsidised their model to get training data), etc. If they increased prices 10x, people would instantly jump ship to the next competitor. There's no moat for Anthropic either, short of constantly training new models in a red queen's race.
You are allowed to be optimistic; pessimists are "losers" (dhh - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjW_dRyKXY).
You are just throwing a temper tantrum (https://archive.is/YNxJq).
Do not commit blasphemy against AI. (https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/talk-bubble-i...)
This is a result of the technology being expensive and centralized vs cheap and decentralized. The marketing claiming it’s aggressive and takes from humans vs uplifting and enriching. And on and on
It makes it really clear what the right thing to do is, make the technology widely available, cheap and let humanity do its thing.
They drink less, which has been documented extensively. The fact they are asking about intensity is a sign of this, not evidence to the contrary. This is a good thing, imo.
I don't know what else to say about it, except that I'm sorry that you think social media was good before AI came along, but the truth is that it has always been crap and was ruined by humans a decade before all of this came along. It wasn't a chat bot that was harassing Ariel Waldmen on Twitter in 2007 and it wasn't a chat bot that refused to do anything about it. If you want to treat humans as important as AI, start by allowing them to take responsibility for their failures. Twitter has always been a toxic garbage dump that feeds on narcissism and slot machine dopamine mechanics.
Yes, that is part of the inevitability strategy. That is absolutely allowed and encouraged!
The rest of your essay is of course pure heresy! :)
I notice a lot more people moving to a career where they manage, as opposed to do the programming. I see why.
I'm slowly phasing out of my software role, I don't even have that much experience yet. I just cannot sit behind a PC for 40 hrs a week talking to a chat bot. I would rather do something useful with the time i've been given.
But you could sit behind a PC for 40 hrs a week talking to a REPL (bash, python). Maybe the coding agent is also worthy, but differently.
A REPL's syntax is well-defined.
A REPL does not pretend to have thoughts and feelings.
Jupyter Notebook baby. The true likely birthplace of the LLM and transformer, lol
That's so true!
As part of my job I host conversations specifically around this, I had a long dinner last night with a diverse group of congressional staffers, engineers, lawyers and managers at the wharf in Washington DC.
I also just got back from Africa and the Middle East talking with student students and educators as well as businessman across those regions.
What’s clear to me is that all of the consistent complaints about AI have nothing to do with AI as a technology. This isn’t new, it’s the history of technological revolution.
To a person, every complaint has to do with the intersection of commerce, government and social structure - and more specifically the management and identification of externalities.
So almost all of the argumentation and debaters are talking past each other
Extremely “pro” AI people talk about all of the real documented progresss but downplaying the risks and challenges and externalities. This is how every revolutionary technology (ICE, spinning jenny, steam engine, etc…) was sold and we live in that.
On the other side the people who are “anti-AI” almost exclusively talk about externalities and never talk about any benefits and any benefits that they do acknowledge are either “not AI” because they aren’t explicitly only LLMs or corrupted by the externalities themselves.
The challenge is both sides are correct in part but they can’t communicate with each other other.
It is all busywork and giving the appearance of an industrial production line to please management.
On the other hand we have spam, blogspam, AI SEO, slop, surveillance, bombing of girls' schools, a bubble, inflation through overspending etc.
It is quite worrisome that you get to influence politicians.
Notably the corporate side of AI development is very deeply involved in politics and so my question boils down to “where is the alternative political coordination happening?”
They're probably too poor to play.
But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.
Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.
It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.
I've wanted to build something rather specific for a long time.
With AI i'm close to release, but had AI not come along it would not have happened for at least another 5 or 10 years depending on what life throws in my way.
They will just prompt their own version into existence without any obvious heritage to yours.
So if you reject projects largely coded by supervised AI, then you simply won't get any of the value from them.
In a sense, all these features and ideas etc were always things that could have existed, but before they sat in the fog of the invisible, and now you get to see many more of them and it can be frustrating. But in a no-LLM world we weren't going to get those features and products anyway.
It's like everyone is fighting for your attention. One argues that an educational video is what you should watch. Another argues that building some piece of software you could easily pay a $1-$10 but now custom built for you is a better use of your time.
Also there's the lottery aspect. Where you use Claude thinking that something you build may strike gold. So it becomes like one big addicting lottery ticket for builders.
Like immagine 200 years ago being able to produce a photorealistic depiction of a scene. Then, it would command you a reputation, a salary, you would have cultural prowess attached to your work, it would generate a legacy for yourself, etc.
Before AI, any cool project would give back so much more than after AI: experience, a following, a community coming around your project which could increase your social capital. It would even give you momentum, spending a long time working on something which would mark you as someone who works on that type of thing, which could lead you to interesting places.
Nowadays, these fleeting project ideas that you can grind out with AI have the effect of children's art projects: you feel a sense of pride at what you made, you like the way it looks, you may hang it somewhere, but no one else really cares, or if they do care, it's not for long.
I don't doubt this is genuine, but I think it points at a broader rift in engineering where what some consider the craft differs: expressing your craft in hand written code or expressing your craft in making software. I lean heavily towards the latter, which means I have the opposite experience as the OP. My creativity has exploded with AI. I feel my craft has expanded into areas that were previously prohibited by time - whether thats actual typing or doing manual research on SO or Google. My control feels improved because my mind is freed to focus more on my vision.
I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way. It doesn't lessen or make the feelings of others no less legitimate. I just think perhaps there's a communication rift where each side isn't necessarily understanding where the other is coming from. As with most things, understanding and nuance is necessary here.
It’s liberating, as you say, but at the same time I feel guilt for building when I know I’m really standing on the shoulders of giants, maybe undeservedly.
I don't know how true this is. I've got a handful of vibe-coded projects that are quite interesting to me, but the project that is by far the most interesting to talk about (and most impressive) is the one that I did back in 2021 before I ever used an LLM.
The common wisdom in this industry is that ideas are cheap, and if that's still true, there's now a pretty high bar for a vibe-coded project to be considered impressive. You need to either execute to an unusually high level of polish, or be building in a space where even having an idea would require a high level of experience.
Of course, I might be wrong. Maybe all these vibe-coded projects really are recruitment fodder?
I used to think that. I came to the realization that I could have technically built Facebook the product, but would never in a million years have built Facebook the company. But having just finished "Careless People" I feel kinda good about that.
I also just got back from a vacation to Alaska. Lots of gold rush stories from Skagway. One of my favorites was a lady who became massively wealthy by starting baking apple pies for the gold rushers. The classic "sell the shovel" story we hear. And one that also tells me not to lament not being first.
I see people who chased that with crypto or whatever hot trend. None of them struck it rich and feel burned out and have little to show for it. But instead to focus on your values and delivering value. Explorers at the time were suffering scurvy from too much canned and salted food so a pie served not just the soul but the body. She didn't have to be there first even.
I also think that the person I am today might not have even had the skills or gotten into the industry if it were 5 or 10 years earlier. It's the mighty ducks "a half inch and it would have gone in" but a half inch in the other direction could have also completely whiffed it.
I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I'd sail the darkened seas,
On a great big clipper ship,
Going from this land here to that,
In a sailor's suit and cap,
Away from the big city
Where a man can not be free
Of all of the evils of this town,
And of himself, and those around.
- The Velvet Underground, "Heroin"
i dont think those exist purely in software anymore- but if you look around at say, the skyrocketing number of elderly and nursing homes (just as an example) there are probably dozens of ways to improve lives and make a good living there
and electronics and hardware has always been so difficult and expensive to get into- but with new infra and workflows and 3d Printing and getting stuff from China- it's vastly cheaper and easier to do a robotics or hardware startup than 20 years ago
there will always be opportunities!
I think there is still something to be said about how subtly different it is to live in a world where software capability is so ubiquitous, and that was previously your competitive edge. Mark Zuckerberg does not strike me as a naturally "salesy" person, he was a really good builder who struck gold, and nobody - not even Google, with billions more and way more people - was able to catch up with him. A lot of his leverage, for a long time, was basically being the guy who could make a world-class website. That's what gave him the cushion to grow into someone who could give a keynote product demo.
When I first started my company it was still hard to build anything to do with SaaS infra. That was an enormous benefit to me because I knew how to do some things that very few other people could do, even though I had no track record or experience doing most other things involved in running a business. It didn't work out as well for me as it did Mark, but it gave me the same kind of on-ramp and credibility to get at least a little capable at non-builder work.
Personally, I am sad that it's already much harder for someone follow their curiosity/interests and go out and learn things, and be able and willing to spend a lot of time building software, and be equally as rewarded for that. Now that only exists if you know extremely proprietary cutting-edge, capital-intensive AI/hardware secrets and maybe even that will evaporate in short order.
It's not that it's "better" for knowledge workers to have a certain level of authority or leverage than others, but that there is a particular kind of person - someone like me - who will no longer be as valuable, or respected, or influential as they were before. Sometimes, changes like that are good, but it's very hard for me to believe that the technology industry is better off being run by people who aren't in it for the love of the game. At the very least, it's not a good feeling to know that people with shared values, and a similar way of thinking as you, are waning in number and influence.
But thats how it is in the world - first come first served.
But I find it hilarious ppl think that building company during for example dotcom was hard. Source - family who did just that.
As a programmer, I cannot let myself be sad for that. Because making other people jobs’ obsolete has been our bread and butter since the beginning of the field.
As a human being, I cannot watch myself in the mirror loathing about the consequences of stuff I have happily inflicted to so many others, without feeling cynical and egoistic.
I don’t know the answer regarding what to do, besides investing and hoping for policies that would make people standard of living mostly independent from their job *if* we all become redundant.