If you can't resist the temptation to pull the AI slot machine lever (which is not necessarily a personal failing!), you might want to seriously examine what your actual motivations are. If you have to use AI for your day job, then yeah it sucks the journey is being taken away from you.
Yes pretty much have to do it for work or at the very least deal with AI PRs and reviews. Also it now feels kinda silly to do it manually even for personal projects because I know there is a faster/better? way and before I wasn't doing it to be hardcore I was just doing it because that's what needed to be done now doing it by hand is like people who enjoy working with those old punch card computers which is a thing but not really the same. The broader ecosystem where you could get help like stackoverflow is also disappearing so I am not even sure how you would solve tricky undocumented issues now maybe by digging really deep into the systems but doesn't seem practical.
This is one thing that has really hit me: I have a question and I always default to Gemini flash or haiku instead of finding quality writing on a subject. So I get the same tinned bullet-point format every time, and my knowledge has become wider, but can only be so deep--only so many things can fit in one's head at any time--so I pay the opportunity cost of finding something that I enjoy sinking my teeth into.
I think about my favorite bands, or games, etc. the ones I cherish most are those hidden gems that I either stumbled upon during some rabbit hole or as a recommendation from a friend. How do I get that now? I can ask Claude, I guess.
If you do try to go down rabbit holes with AI, you get a deluge of information, but it is basically like what Google has become, minus the ads: aggregates the most easily accessible data, blends it up and distills it to some slurry that might kind of be coherent, and which will definitely sound authoritative, but... Is it?
And, of course, then what happens to the hidden gems that have a very low (whatever the equivalent of) PageRank but maybe because they're not highly optimized, ultra-processed and generally agreeable or popular. The channels through which one could readily receive information are all being flooded out/absorbed. Maybe I should try Kagi, or get into irc and build that rss graph.
Two's complement just had a great episode on this topic. None of us have absorbed the costs of the tradeoff we are all making by using these things, much like we didn't for using social media, or the slide into the techno-corporate surveillance state that happened after the patriot act. We are paying those costs and I am certainly feeling them more than ever recently.
It seems most companies who employ developers are going the direction of agentic coding, so for most of us there is not an option. This is where the real crisis is.
Comments
A big part of the journey is the exact thing AI took away though! The destination mostly has remained.
If you can't resist the temptation to pull the AI slot machine lever (which is not necessarily a personal failing!), you might want to seriously examine what your actual motivations are. If you have to use AI for your day job, then yeah it sucks the journey is being taken away from you.
Yes pretty much have to do it for work or at the very least deal with AI PRs and reviews. Also it now feels kinda silly to do it manually even for personal projects because I know there is a faster/better? way and before I wasn't doing it to be hardcore I was just doing it because that's what needed to be done now doing it by hand is like people who enjoy working with those old punch card computers which is a thing but not really the same. The broader ecosystem where you could get help like stackoverflow is also disappearing so I am not even sure how you would solve tricky undocumented issues now maybe by digging really deep into the systems but doesn't seem practical.
This is one thing that has really hit me: I have a question and I always default to Gemini flash or haiku instead of finding quality writing on a subject. So I get the same tinned bullet-point format every time, and my knowledge has become wider, but can only be so deep--only so many things can fit in one's head at any time--so I pay the opportunity cost of finding something that I enjoy sinking my teeth into.
I think about my favorite bands, or games, etc. the ones I cherish most are those hidden gems that I either stumbled upon during some rabbit hole or as a recommendation from a friend. How do I get that now? I can ask Claude, I guess.
If you do try to go down rabbit holes with AI, you get a deluge of information, but it is basically like what Google has become, minus the ads: aggregates the most easily accessible data, blends it up and distills it to some slurry that might kind of be coherent, and which will definitely sound authoritative, but... Is it?
And, of course, then what happens to the hidden gems that have a very low (whatever the equivalent of) PageRank but maybe because they're not highly optimized, ultra-processed and generally agreeable or popular. The channels through which one could readily receive information are all being flooded out/absorbed. Maybe I should try Kagi, or get into irc and build that rss graph.
Two's complement just had a great episode on this topic. None of us have absorbed the costs of the tradeoff we are all making by using these things, much like we didn't for using social media, or the slide into the techno-corporate surveillance state that happened after the patriot act. We are paying those costs and I am certainly feeling them more than ever recently.
It seems most companies who employ developers are going the direction of agentic coding, so for most of us there is not an option. This is where the real crisis is.