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First, anhedonia is a real psychological crisis. You might want to speak to a professional. Second, the old saying "it's the journey not the destination" is ap

First, anhedonia is a real psychological crisis. You might want to speak to a professional. Second, the old saying "it's the journey not the destination" is apt here. If you didn't enjoy the process in the first place then even if AI never came around something would have knocked the wind out of your sails. If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing. Either learn to love the process or begin the journey of searching for some other thing to fill the void left behind.

gagabity 1mo ago
A big part of the journey is the exact thing AI took away though! The destination mostly has remained.
- CoolestBeans 1mo ago
  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.
  - gagabity 1mo ago
    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.
    - matltc 27d ago
      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.
  - harryquach 1mo ago
    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.
brailsafe 1mo ago
> If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing I can still hike to the top of mountains even though helicopters exist, but if helicopter tourism is as popular as it seems to be becoming, and Bluetooth speakers are as available as they are, the journey and result is going to feel very different, if it's not entirely ruined.
- CoolestBeans 1mo ago
  The comparison breaks down because noise pollution is unavoidable. AI hype might be unavoidable unless you code in a vacuum but you can be disciplined in how much you let it in. Even if AI cheapens the actual output, it fundamentally cannot touch your intrinsic motivations for work, which was my original point.
  - brailsafe 1mo ago
    > The comparison breaks down because noise pollution is unavoidable. That's not remotely true, but it's not just noise pollution, it's also actual pollution, and it cheapens the overall experience with the presence of an excessive amount of people who've potentially pnly bought their way there and have no long-term care for keeping it serene. More litter, dog shit on the trail perhaps, etc.. and yes more noise. It's an analogy for the poisoning of the market for whatever you'd be working on, hollowing of the process to get there, and further destruction of the long-term viability of the pursuit itself by compromising its integrity through transactional commodification. In theory, there will always be people who exclusively and ruthlessly only care about the numbers, getting the product "done", or the raw numeric achievement of climbing the mountain, which is how everything gets enshittified. Similar thing with gaming. You could tell me that if I truly like a game, it shouldn't matter how much they gradually dumb it down, make it efficient to play for almost anyone, or pack it tip-to-taint with microtransactions, but the reality is that all of those factors are the equivalent of strip mining the player base and leaving an empty pit.
japgolly 1mo ago
Note: Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure or joy.

gagabity 1mo ago

A big part of the journey is the exact thing AI took away though! The destination mostly has remained.

CoolestBeans 1mo ago
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.
- gagabity 1mo ago
  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.
  - matltc 27d ago
    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.
- harryquach 1mo ago
  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.

brailsafe 1mo ago

> If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing I can still hike to the top of mountains even though helicopters exist, but if helicopter tourism is as popular as it seems to be becoming, and Bluetooth speakers are as available as they are, the journey and result is going to feel very different, if it's not entirely ruined.

CoolestBeans 1mo ago
The comparison breaks down because noise pollution is unavoidable. AI hype might be unavoidable unless you code in a vacuum but you can be disciplined in how much you let it in. Even if AI cheapens the actual output, it fundamentally cannot touch your intrinsic motivations for work, which was my original point.
- brailsafe 1mo ago
  > The comparison breaks down because noise pollution is unavoidable. That's not remotely true, but it's not just noise pollution, it's also actual pollution, and it cheapens the overall experience with the presence of an excessive amount of people who've potentially pnly bought their way there and have no long-term care for keeping it serene. More litter, dog shit on the trail perhaps, etc.. and yes more noise. It's an analogy for the poisoning of the market for whatever you'd be working on, hollowing of the process to get there, and further destruction of the long-term viability of the pursuit itself by compromising its integrity through transactional commodification. In theory, there will always be people who exclusively and ruthlessly only care about the numbers, getting the product "done", or the raw numeric achievement of climbing the mountain, which is how everything gets enshittified. Similar thing with gaming. You could tell me that if I truly like a game, it shouldn't matter how much they gradually dumb it down, make it efficient to play for almost anyone, or pack it tip-to-taint with microtransactions, but the reality is that all of those factors are the equivalent of strip mining the player base and leaving an empty pit.

japgolly 1mo ago

Note: Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure or joy.