3 ms·

I'd say, you are at the phase of this journey where you're feeling empowered. It's just one step along the path of AI adoption to execute on an idea and see in

I'd say, you are at the phase of this journey where you're feeling empowered. It's just one step along the path of AI adoption to execute on an idea and see in near real-time the idea you had baked in your head come alive in front of you. Most of us get to this point and become the biggest evangelists of the tech. I see no reason you should feel guilty for the excitement you're feeling right now, and you should enjoy the journey. You're definitely paying for it in tokens, that's for sure. However, there will come a point at which you will have successfully willed into existence a novel thing that you always wanted, and there it is, exactly as you dreamed, but by then, you'll be left with a weird empty feeling you won't really have the words for. Maybe it's a feeling of not earning the thing you built, or maybe it's just, your idea is finished and now you have to think of another idea. Certainly, this was your idea though, and it proves you were right, or at least on to something, and it is valuable, to you. Yet, you didn't go on the journey to get there. You didn't bump up against limitations of the programming language or system and think about workarounds while you were showering or commuting to the office. You basically bought the finished product from the dynamic template marketplace of Anthropic (or whereever), and that's cool that it does what you need. It just isn't really programming, or being a software engineer in the traditional sense. What used to be something you could potentially leave your day job for to go create a startup with a cofounder over, or maybe sell off to a buyer, or just open source and share with the world, isn't going to have the same meaning. It's a black box of code that you'll need a coding agent to continue working on, keeping that money flowing to Anthropic or whereever. Anyway, I think the Slot Machine question is where a lot of early adopters are now at in this journey, and once more of us are there, then we can start asking the hard questions. Right now too many of us are where you're at, and it's impossible to know where things will end up in a year or so.

devanil 7mo ago
Don't you think that's overreacting? I know it's an important moment for us, but your speech sounds kind of theological. Almost condemning him to hell for "feeling pleasure."
- the_af 7mo ago
  There's no condemning at all in the comment you're replying to, in fact the opposite: there's understanding. It's very weird because judging from this comment, and some other comment you wrote asking whether the other person believed creation requires hard work (which wasn't at all what they said), makes it seem as if you aren't reading the comments you're replying to.
  - rcxdude 7mo ago
    It is hard to read the comment in question as anything other than 'the struggle is important to your satisfaction', which to me feels at the very least not unversally true (different people will find satisfaction from different things: for me personally I have far more ideas than I could ever make real, so 'having to come up with one' is not really something I expect to be a problem), at worst a kind of religious 'virtue through suffering' moral judgement. (If the goal was to learn, then that's a different question. Learning generally requires putting the effort in. But I don't think that learning the lower-level details is actually the goal in a lot of cases, merely a means to an end)
    - the_af 7mo ago
      I didn't read it like that. I read it like... say, asking a genie to produce stuff for you out of thin air. "Make the most beautiful gem for me!". Then, "a marvelous painting that will impress my beloved!", "a meal worthy of a king!", etc. After the novelty wears off, those are empty achievements. They are not yours, you haven't chipped a single facet of the gem, nor found it yourself, nor lifted a paintbrush or understood how paint flows. It's not about struggling (or not just that), it's about doing [1]. You haven't earned the things you didn't do. You don't think you're cooking when you order a ready meal. Same here. And yet there's not a single bit of condemnation in the comment we're discussing. Just understanding, "this is a phase we all go through, but look...". --- [1] I hate that we must add disclaimers now, but I promise this is me, a human, and not an LLM'ism, "it's not X. It's Y."
      - 7mo ago
ThrowawayTestr 7mo ago
>you'll be left with a weird empty feeling you won't really have the words for I want computers to do work for me. Any barrier between me and the result I want is an annoyance.

devanil 7mo ago

Don't you think that's overreacting? I know it's an important moment for us, but your speech sounds kind of theological. Almost condemning him to hell for "feeling pleasure."

the_af 7mo ago
There's no condemning at all in the comment you're replying to, in fact the opposite: there's understanding. It's very weird because judging from this comment, and some other comment you wrote asking whether the other person believed creation requires hard work (which wasn't at all what they said), makes it seem as if you aren't reading the comments you're replying to.
- rcxdude 7mo ago
  It is hard to read the comment in question as anything other than 'the struggle is important to your satisfaction', which to me feels at the very least not unversally true (different people will find satisfaction from different things: for me personally I have far more ideas than I could ever make real, so 'having to come up with one' is not really something I expect to be a problem), at worst a kind of religious 'virtue through suffering' moral judgement. (If the goal was to learn, then that's a different question. Learning generally requires putting the effort in. But I don't think that learning the lower-level details is actually the goal in a lot of cases, merely a means to an end)
  - the_af 7mo ago
    I didn't read it like that. I read it like... say, asking a genie to produce stuff for you out of thin air. "Make the most beautiful gem for me!". Then, "a marvelous painting that will impress my beloved!", "a meal worthy of a king!", etc. After the novelty wears off, those are empty achievements. They are not yours, you haven't chipped a single facet of the gem, nor found it yourself, nor lifted a paintbrush or understood how paint flows. It's not about struggling (or not just that), it's about doing [1]. You haven't earned the things you didn't do. You don't think you're cooking when you order a ready meal. Same here. And yet there's not a single bit of condemnation in the comment we're discussing. Just understanding, "this is a phase we all go through, but look...". --- [1] I hate that we must add disclaimers now, but I promise this is me, a human, and not an LLM'ism, "it's not X. It's Y."
    - 7mo ago

ThrowawayTestr 7mo ago

>you'll be left with a weird empty feeling you won't really have the words for I want computers to do work for me. Any barrier between me and the result I want is an annoyance.