7 ms·
It's fun, but every new model release makes me even less interested to create cool stuff. Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?
by XCSme 1mo ago
It's fun, but every new model release makes me even less interested to create cool stuff. Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?
- ivanjermakov 1mo agoMake cool stuff because the process is fun and makes you learn?
- XCSme 1mo agoBefore it was fun because I was learning useful things for the future. Now it feels like whatever I learn will be obsolete in 2 months.
- ravenstine 1mo ago2 months seems generous at this point. Every new thing I "learn" seems to be obsolete within a week or two, if it's not obsolete already.
- wartywhoa23 1mo agoLearn for what exactly?
- cindyllm 1mo ago[dead]
- paxys 1mo agoIs there a point in playing Chess or Go when you know there's a computer out there that can beat you (and everyone else)?
- XCSme 1mo agoNo, that's why I just play against other humans. In this game of work/development, you can't make sure that other humans don't "cheat". Our work won't compete anymore with other human's work, but with a computer.
- paxys 1mo agoWhy does it matter if others are "cheating" or not? Your own creation isn't affected by it.
- XCSme 1mo agoWell, for the same reason playing chess vs a person is more fun than doing chess puzzles, if we follow that analogy. Also, creating something with AI doesn't really feel like you made it yourself. And, if you make it without AI, most of the times it feels pointless, why spend 30 days on working on something that can be done faster and better in 1 hour? I am not saying about doing things for fun, but about creating useful things. Yes, you can do "hand-crafted" things, and people appreciate that, but for code, people aren't able to see the craft anyway.
- mercanlIl 1mo agoYour ability to sell that creation is certainly affected by the competition. Which affects your ability to put food on the table, so to speak.
- paxys 1mo agoIf the motive is satisfaction/enjoyment then it shouldn't matter what an AI is capable of. You should be happy with your own creation. If the motive is profit then you should be adopting AI just like you have adopted any other skill or tool of your profession.
- XCSme 1mo ago> You should be happy with your own creation. I mentioned this in another comment, but we are social animals, we get most joy by sharing what we have created. And the problem now is that it's getting very hard to share and discover genuine creations vs AI-generated ones.
- ryan_n 1mo agoYou can play PvP in those games. Not really the same with developing software. In fact, not using ai would probably make you lose if there was some “software PvP” mode or development.
- sashank_1509 1mo agoAgreed
- gavinray 1mo ago> Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds? Live a life doing whatever makes you happy. Post-work society is an inevitability if we don't destroy our planet.
- lackoftactics 1mo agoGary Economics wants to have a word with you. It would be fun to get to post-work society, but hard to imagine atm. TPTB won't let it happen
- XCSme 1mo agoBut how this transition will even happen? Soon we will have some machines that can replace 50% of jobs, and this will happen basically overnight...
- neta1337 1mo agoIt won't happen though
- unclad5968 1mo agoThe steam engine replaced a lot of jobs. Tractors replaced a lot of jobs. Calculators replaced a lot of jobs. Computer used to be a job description before it was a personal device. There will be new jobs.
- kypro 1mo agoIt's less lack of interest in creating that bothers me, it's my lack of interest in learning – it would surely be crazy for a SWE to care about how some new framework works anymore? Even if someone could reasonably argue that it might be slightly useful today there's almost zero chance it will be useful in 6-12 months times. But it's not just tech – my lack of interest in learning and creating is starting to generalise with the models. Music, writing, coding, maths, etc... I need to get used to switching my head off and asking the AIs to think for me whenever I need to engage my brain. It still feels very unnatural.
- Fergusonb 1mo agoI think a general understanding is still useful, you just don't need all of the details anymore. The brain loves these kinds of shortcuts. I don't need to think about the fine motor skills of hitting a baseball, it's just a motion now, and the game is still fun.
- XCSme 1mo agoBut how would you feel if you imagined hitting the ball and a robot arm hit it instead? Because that's how creating software is starting to feel.
- qlte 1mo agoAnd, any time you mentioned getting a bit better at hitting a ball after practicing over your weekend, a bunch of people carrying printouts of generic exponential graphs jumped out to call you a Luddite who should sell his gear ASAP while it still has any value and or else it's "cope".
- billypilgrim 1mo ago„The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall.“ -Mitch Hedberg
- xtracto 1mo agoThank you. That is an amazing quote on a lot of levels.
- XCSme 1mo agoThe same how Magnus Carlsen says he never plays chess against a computer, because it makes no sense to do it.
- tintor 1mo agoIt makes sense for practice.
- f311a 1mo agoWell, people don't play like computers, so this kind of practice can be useless.
- wvbdmp 1mo agoHow much of professional chess is metagaming the opponent vs. finding the best move from current game state?
- XCSme 1mo agoFrom what pros are saying after matches, especially in classical chess, it's almost always preparation and metagaming the opponent vs finding good moves. It's a lot of mind games involved, going for specific openings, repeating same moves as last match, doing a poor by surprising, move etc. Many GMs said that to win a match you have to play non-ideal moves many times, otherwise it will likely end in a draw.
- 1mo ago
- flaviolivolsi 1mo agoI think the limit increasingly becomes what your imagination and taste can reach
- XCSme 1mo agoTrue, but for many domains where my knowledge is limited, the LLMs beat me at imagination and taste too...
- soundworlds 1mo agoDon't worry, like with every revolutionary technology before this, it takes 5-10 years for people to find new and creative ways to use it. It will be considered its own medium in many spaces (e.g. film is now different to theatre)
- XCSme 1mo agoBut was there ever a technology that even the people working on it said it's making them feel depressed and scared?
- david-gpu 1mo agoI used to work on this stuff. It does not make me depressed nor scared, and my coworkers didn't voice that opinion, either. You can't cherry pick somebody's opinion and assume it applies to everybody.
- diegocg 1mo agoAsk the luddites
- wartywhoa23 1mo agoThe parent wrote > even the people working on it I don't think luddites constructed textile machines themselves.
- Flere-Imsaho 1mo ago> Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds? I built a phone app recently, not released to the public, just an idea I had for ages but could never spend the time actually building. Its 100% vibe coded, and took me a few weekends to build... I'm talking a few hours in total. The point I'm making is that you now have the power to create stuff you would never have had the time to build. You can think big, wild stuff. Experimentation. Throw-away code. What a time to be alive!
- rmsaksida 1mo agoMy car has offline maps and navigation. I don't really care for navigation, but I find the maps pretty handy. VW releases updates very infrequently, and I don't know for how long they'll keep doing that. Recently I wondered whether I could convert OpenStreetMaps into the format used by the car. Codex took around a week to do that for me, with some light steering. That project would no doubt have taken me months - maybe a whole year to do on my own, and I'm not fully confident I could pull it off as well as Codex did. I can pull the most up to date maps from OSM, edit them as much as I want, and they look great on the car. It's mind boggling to me that we have this tech.
- echoangle 1mo agoDoes the car not check a signature or anything like that? You can just use any selfmade data?
- rmsaksida 1mo agoIt does, but someone leaked valid encryption keys on GitHub a few years ago (Codex found them).
- kami23 1mo agoLove that, I have similar desires to be able to control some climate controllers so I can get a more native bluetooth connection to it and override their programming for fine control of devices and have it never phone back home. One of these days I'll have time to throw an LLM at it, but I've been working on a dead project for 4 years ago I dropped because I realized how daunting it was going to be turn it into a product, but now I've made progress that would have taken me a year, in a few weekends.
- bgarbiak 1mo agoYeah. I’m almost glad I didn’t invest any time in any of my 100s ideas for a startup. Most of them would be destroyed by AI by now. But, you can create cool stuff just for yourself. That’s the upside. It’s just hard to make a living on cool stuff for yourself.
- ryan_n 1mo agoFor some reason, I feel much less excited about creating things myself just knowing that ai can do it in 1/10th of the time. Even if I know it wouldn’t turn into a business or make me money. I don’t know why that is, but I was much more motivated to build anything (even things just for myself) before ai. Kinda depressing
- Kon5ole 1mo agoThe flip side to ai doing your stuff in 1/10 the time is that you can now do 10x more. Even things you couldn’t do at all, in fact. I find that very motivating. I can do things alone that would have required a team only one year ago.
- ryan_n 1mo agoThat's fair, I guess I just enjoy the craft of building stuff rather than the outcome/product itself. Which I know I can still do, but for some reason just doesn't feel the same now. Hard to explain I guess.
- sashank_1509 1mo agoLots of us feel that way. It was motivating to do it, when it couldn’t be 1-shotted by AI in a weekend
- variadix 1mo agoAt least for me, I think half the value in building to learn was that the knowledge and skills acquired in the process, especially cursory skills and knowledge, might be useful in the future, even if there was no obvious path to application at the time. I built several projects at home, many involving learning e.g. graphics programming and rendering, that would never be useful in my professional work, but which were intrinsically interesting and enabled me to build other, more useful projects later on. It also gave me greater confidence in my abilities as an engineer, and cursory skills I learned in the process did help in my professional work. Now it feels like what’s the point. The machines can or will be able to build anything I could want, useful or not, faster and with less frustration. I probably won’t be able to be employed as an engineer long enough to build a career on said skills. And I can’t mentally justify not spending that time with friends and family, when the expected return is basically zero. I still find math, science, and engineering interesting and intrinsically rewarding, but in a closer sense to how one might feel about playing video games. The information is or will eventually be useless, so it isn’t worth spending a significant amount of time on.
- nater5000 1mo agoThe point is to inject something into the process that these AIs can't do for you. People SHOULD feel like making a useless Mario Kart clone isn't worth the effort anymore. They should, instead, be trying to figure out how to actually use these models to make something that doesn't feel like a useless Mario Kart clone.
- XCSme 1mo agoOne thing that still stands today, is that even vibe-coding a good product takes time and thousands of dollars in tokens costs. Software will be more like a "proof of work", where people would still pay $100 for good software that took $10k tokens to build.
- taurath 1mo agoWhere are these products, I would like to see them
- sigseg1v 1mo agoEvery piece of software you have interacted with that's run by a company and has been updated within the last 6 months? You'd be hard pressed to find a company not using AI to develop software.
- taurath 1mo agoI am a software dev and use LLMs daily but that’s not what I’m talking about, I’m talking about vibe coded products built new. I find LLMs much less useful at things that are not already built. I’ve watched initiative after initiative fail because of too much dogmatic AI usage and leaning on it to do design which then falls over on its face. Fast at first especially to a PoC but then you hit a time when the arch just gets so grimy it falls over, you ship the wrong thing and you end up in rework hell. This isn’t guaranteed but when it’s teams of people slinging slop it gets worse and worse, the best devs burn out from trying to manage the ones who believe AI will save them. Its like the problems of outsourcing all the time
- maxnevermind 1mo agoMaybe instead of creating cool stuff try to go and solve real problems? It seems to me that we are lacking in that department since all that LLM fuss has started 3 or so years ago.
- ryan_n 1mo agoWhat is a "real problem" to you?
- maxnevermind 1mo agoIt is a subset of something of a value to somebody else and enough so that they are willing to pay you for it, a product, a service. Preferably to pay enough to justify your spent time of course, maybe not right away but at least long term. Even better if not purely digital as it seems we have quite enough of those already.
- andriy_koval 1mo agoCould you teach me/us how to find this niche? Especially in current world, where for each type of problem there are 200 vibe coded tools.
- xtracto 1mo agoLike the guy who treated cancer in his dog?
- myaccountonhn 1mo agoClimate change
- iammrpayments 1mo agoOpenAi customer support would be a good start
- globular-toast 1mo agoJust a few: - Lots of diseases which kill indiscriminately, - Thousands of people each year feel the need to commit suicide in ways that affect others profoundly, like via train, - Shoe and clothing sizes are inconsistent and unreliable, - Male pattern baldness, - Over dependence on cars for transport, which are noisy, smelly and dangerous, - Obesity, - We can buy cigarettes and alcohol freely, but not any decent drugs like MDMA.
- zeroCalories 1mo agoCan it? Last I checked, all my free software operating systems and browsers were still hacked together trash. I can't wait for AI to actually be good so I can spam a bunch of AGPL code with it.
- spicyusername 1mo agoThe process was for you, the product was for the world. Now it's just the product for the world, which was where most of the value was anyways. It's a big paradigm shift and the industry is quickly going to shed people who needed the process to care about the product and we'll be left with people whose motivation to build the product (or money) is enough.
- XCSme 1mo agoBut what product? If the world can also simply ask for the product they want, instead of searching for it? They won't even have to ask for a specific product, they will just state their problems/needs.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- danparsonson 1mo agoHave you ever worked directly with customers? Even those paying huge amounts of money for custom software usually don't know what they really need. They usually know their problems, but even then it can still require a lot of exploration to get to the core of it all, and then design an appropriate solution; not to mention having a good awareness of how software actually intersects with real life rather than how a non-technical customer imagines it does. I know we're getting closer to robots that can do all that but I don't believe we're there yet.
- XCSme 1mo agoI do, and some clients did start using Claude, where they just say their problems and Claude provides the solution.
- danparsonson 29d agoOh well... I'd better start brushing up on my busking skills then I guess
- lonrenor 1mo agoIMO there has been a regime shift to building things for yourself and what is cool is the output of the tools you make. I have started building my own Digital Audio Workstation. The point is not to build something to compete with Ableton. The point is to build something and make music with it. If it is a good tool then I should be able to make good music with it and release the music. Actually, the DAW should be the secret sauce of the music and something I wouldn't want to give away. This feels a lot more like computing in the 90s after taking an odd 25 year detour of an obsession with the tools themselves instead of what the tools can actually do.
- qlte 1mo ago> This feels a lot more like computing in the 90s after taking an odd 25 year detour of an obsession with the tools themselves instead of what the tools can actually do. This sounds more like the opposite of what you're saying. Music is one of my main hobbies too but I enjoy using a DAW to ... play and write music. Writing out specs and testing a new custom DAW seems closer to writing code in an IDE than playing music. Like, professional electronic music artists spend 10s of thousands of hours in a DAW, but at that point it just becomes second nature and the tool disappears so they can focus entirely on the music.
- wartywhoa23 1mo ago> Actually, the DAW should be the secret sauce of the music and something I wouldn't want to give away. There's got to be someone to listen to your music in order for that secret sauce to have any meaning. What's the use of any "secret sauce" in something that only you listen to, because everyone else is either content with AI slop "music", or better yet "create" it for themselves just like you "create" your secret DAW?
- cindyllm 1mo ago[dead]
- tintor 1mo agoYou can contribute to Open Source projects that DO NOT allow AI generated code. For example: zig
- cromka 1mo agoJust make sure to not even check code comments for spelling errors, there’s a risk your tool might be using AI for that /s
- iammrpayments 1mo agoThis has not been my experience so far.
- XCSme 1mo agoThat's good to hear. How long and much have you been using LLMs for? I think it takes ~1 year of heavy usage for this feeling to set in, it's like the 5 stages of grief, there's different phases. Now a big overwhelm come from the fact that the AI can work a lot faster than I can verify/check manually. Combined with the fact that not using the 100% usage of the subscription feels like wasting money/potential, leads to a feeling that I should always be doing more, where at the same time, it's getting hard to remember what am I even doing, when working on 3-4 projects at once. And I do work in multiple projects at once, because that's how AI works best nowadays, if you have two threads running for the same project, it gets buggy or wasted tokens (like two people working in the same file at the same time, merge conflicts ,etc.) So the solution is to have the AI work on many, independent tasks at once, but it gets overwhelming for a single person to keep track of all...
- briHass 1mo agoYep, nailed me exactly. Leaving unused subscription percentage is getting rarer, however. I am about to bump up my plan, which is starting to feel like a drug addict's tolerance.
- monster_truck 1mo agoYou're not being ambitious enough! Spend your tokens now building the primitives and foundations of much larger, complex systems. No matter how much faster and more efficient models get, eliminating the gruntwork will always pay dividends.
- XCSme 1mo agoThat's what I am doing and usually telling others to: don't prompt the AI to do something, prompt the AI to create a system that does that something. It's true, it's fun to have those systems, maybe I care more about them than the product, because the promise is "better, cheaper results in the future". But those systems are software too, and only tools, and will likely too be obsolete in 1 year from now. I think it's a bit better when creating stuff now with a very short-term view: create something that is useful NOW, it doesn't matter it won't be useful tomorrow. Create it now and get it into the hands of people now.
- winrid 1mo agolol have you actually tried to build anything useful e2e? Leaving the AI to itself gives horrendous results.
- XCSme 1mo agoYes, many projects, used in production at various scales. Some even for large clients, and they work well in production, clients are happy, yet I feel no connection to the work. If the client says something, I just copy-paste it to the AI and it fixes it/implements it. There is too much code and complexity to check if the changes are ok, apart from seeing it if it seems visually ok and if the problem is fixed live. It almost always works, but it definitely doesn't have the same feeling as thinking of the problem, finding a solution, and implementing it, part which most developers enjoy in their work.
- DWe1 1mo ago> There is too much code and complexity to check if the changes are ok To me, the challenge in software is to reduce this complexity to keep it manageable. Probably AI can manage more complexity than a human being, but it seems to be difficult to prevent or reduce that complexity in the first place. How is your experience once the complexity is too hard for a frontier LLM to handle, or for you to prompt the correct direction towards it?
- XCSme 1mo agoI basically stop caring about the code, never look at it, and just tell it what to be aware of from my experience. Tell it stuff like "use caching", "use library X", "make sure that it works when offline", etc. And then basically live test it and see if it works as expected, and tell it more improvements/changes to make.
- winrid 1mo agoI see. So the agent didn't build it blind. A human reviewed it and you had to make changes.
- sbochins 1mo agoThen learn how to be creative and use the ai better?
- XCSme 1mo agoIt's like telling a painter who polished their craft and every brush stroke for 20 years, that now got access to a robot that does the painting, to be more creative in what it tells the robot to paint. Imagine Bob Ross prompting a robot what to paint...
- sbochins 1mo agoThere’s nothing stopping Bob Ross from painting and obviously nobody is suggesting him using a robot to paint. I think he’d be clearheaded enough to welcome new forms of creativity, unlike some of his less open minded fans.
- globular-toast 1mo agoSo this what a deflation economy is like. People don't want to do anything because they feel like whatever they do will be worthless in the near future. I've retreated to doing stuff with my hands. Wokdwork, DIY, that kind of thing. At least for now and the foreseeable future that doesn't seem pointless. Only problem is it's hard work yet nobody would pay me for it.
- XCSme 1mo agoThat's a good idea. I might go more into table-tennis coaching, probably people would still prefer to be coached by a real person and not a robot for a very long time.
- globular-toast 1mo agoYeah, I think if you're a nice person that people enjoy being around then there will be plenty of opportunities. Funnily enough, I used to work on pre-LLM natural language processing at an insurance company about 10 years ago. One of the call centre staff quipped about us taking their jobs. I hadn't given it a moment's thought beforehand, but I said something then that I think still stands today. I said that what we are trying to do is automate the boring parts of your job so that you have more time to do the part that really matters: being there, being human, for someone in their time of need. When my mum died at home this year, my dad called the local GP practice to let someone know and was greeted by a chatbot. This is someone who has just lost their wife of 40 years and doesn't really know what to do. Imagine having to deal with a chatbot in this time. It didn't work and he got frustrated and gave up, exasperated. I took over but instead called a local hospice charity that had been involved and got straight through to a person. In no more than 60 seconds I had said everything that needed to be said, it was acknowledged with genuine sympathy and the wheels were in motion for the next steps. This is what we need society to be like. We should use computers for the things they are good at, but we don't need them to be like people, because we have people for that.
- XCSme 1mo agoThanks for sharing! I am so sorry for your loss. I agree, some things should be automated, something should never be. I think it will take us quite some time to realize which is which, and the consequences involved. The problem with AI now is that it seems to be taking over all the things nice, and making it harder to appreciate human-made things. It's like being in a museum with 99 AI-generated paintings, and 1 human-made one. Whould would enjoy visiting that museum? You don't even know which one is the human-made one. This is how it feels now, what's the point of creating "hand-made" stuff when it gets lost in a sea of slop? Both parties are upset (creator for not getting attention, viewer for not knowing anymore what is real or not, or what was made and curated by a human or not). I made a random tweet yesterday, that "the future is offline". I do think we will get fatigue from having access to infinite, hyper-personalized content, so much that we will completely disregard ALL content. I also lost my 31yo partner to cancer last year, and the only thing she cared most about was being remembered and knowing that she had done something meaningful in her life, that she left some impact on this world. AI is taking many of those opportunities, to make impact.
- taurath 1mo agoI find it regularly incapable of doing the most basic things - maybe the idea is to think in terms of more detail? It’s kind of like saying what’s the point of poetry when a dictionary exists
- XCSme 1mo agoWhat model are you using? I used GPT 5.6 Sol Extra High (Fast) for the last month, around 4-5h per day, and it managed to acomplished most of the tasks it had. It didn't really impress and often the end result needed one or two tweaks/fixes, but it did work and could create e2e solutions.
- wesleywt 1mo agoThey can't create innovative stuff. They can only create what they are trained on.
- Measter 1mo agoA project I've just started is to follow the Roguelikedev tutorial on a 32-year-old PC, using the period dev tools. I'm going to have to write everything myself, and I'm currently researching how to poke the graphics adaptor. Why bother doing that when it would be vastly easier on a modern computer?
- lmf4lol 1mo agolisten to the DHH round two at Lex Friedman. Dropped a few days ago. Its inspiring