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In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the id

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longer is the person you are. AI is not perfect, I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch, serving only a single customer, where digital products by definition are near zero marginal cost, so it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better. PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply.

Fraterkes 7d ago
One of the big points of art is expressing something to other people. Tired of this sort of shallow dismissal where wanting recognition, or for your art to reach people is cast as a kind of vanity that real artists ought to get over.
- FeteCommuniste 7d ago
  Exactly. Motivation is rarely a question of either/or (art for art's sake / art for recognition). And for many practitioners, being part of a community of fellow artists who "know the struggle" is also part of the fun.
  - mcluck 6d ago
    "Knowing the struggle" is/was a massive part of my enjoyment of programming. I used to love browsing Github just to see what people were building and really appreciating clever ideas or the amount of work required to make something, especially when it's something of limited commercial value. Now I feel like I've lost that. So it's not just that I don't get appreciation for my work but I find it's harder to appreciate other people's work.
  - CuriouslyC 6d ago
    There will always be communities of people who want to handcraft everything, who will be available to commiserate about the struggle of their craft. We still have people doing crazy shit like collecting/smelting iron by hand and smithing it into swords (which will literally never be used).
    - FeteCommuniste 6d ago
      Probably, just like now where there are still small groups of hobbyist programmers who write in little-used languages for obscure old platforms hardly anyone else cares about. But I think it's perfectly fair to mourn the prospect of something that used to be both your passion and livelihood get pushed to some dusty niche corner of the tech landscape.
- nrjames 7d ago
  I don't think that an artist or game developer wanting recognition is the problem here. I think it's the reflection of their intentions on the consumer in an environment where it's increasingly difficult to separate the cash grabs from the craft.
- card_zero 6d ago
  Yeah, I wanted to say that too. You can't (always) separate enjoying the craft from enjoying the praise. People too often talk about the value of an art object divorced from its provenance, as if you could measure its goodness with a meter, instead of the value of the audience relating to the personality expressed in it, which means it's a communication, and the communication isn't all one-way. When you're crafting something you're initiating that communication. Of course you want praise, or distressed complaints or anyway some reaction.
  - eszed 6d ago
    I agree with all of that, but I think there's a bit of "ball-hiding" going on in most of these conversations. It isn't only that programmers crave(d) praise or social recognition (though maybe that's it for some), but they're also having to come to terms with the fact that their "art-form" suddenly has much, much less economic value. They were able, for a long time, to (and I say this absolutely non-pejoratively - in fact, just the opposite) have their cake and eat it too, by being virtually guaranteed to make a living (in practice, in the demographic most represented on this board, a very good one) doing a thing they love to do. It's gauche, in Anglo-Saxon countries, to talk openly about one's own financial circumstances, so that mostly doesn't get raised in these threads, but I can hear it in the background of most of them, like "whaddya mean no one's gonna pay me to solve interesting problems with code any more? Now I've gotta do that, if I'm ever going to do that at all, in my spare time, for free?" And I so, so, so sympathize with that. I devoted 25 years of my life to the performing arts, from which - as a very unattached young man - I was able scrape an exceedingly frugal living. That, in the arts, is a success story - the vast majority make no living from doing it at all, in fact probably the reverse. Coders arguably have it worse: it's hard to see anyone making any money from "writing code", ever again. It's not surprising to me that they're confused and hurt right now: they have, quickly, sadly, and unexpectedly been pushed into the economic corner other artists always have occupied.
    - Chris2048 6d ago
      > their "art-form" suddenly has much, much less economic value Can you define art/artist? If software is art, then what profession isn't? Software still has value, specifically utility, it's just cheaper to produce, its market value is lower. How is that comparable to the arts?
- CuriouslyC 6d ago
  The nuance here is that people aren't good at evaluating their own work/progress, and use recognition as a proxy milestone of their own improvement. No matter how good they get, they don't "feel" good until someone else (or many someones) comes and tells them "you're good"
- 59percentmore 6d ago
  And why can't that apply to people who use generative AI? Expression isn't about seeking recognition, in the sense of clout or popularity, it's simply a matter of "I want other people to be able to see what I see." If I compare what I'm able to produce by hand, and what I'm able to get the computer to spit out, it's pretty clear to me which is closest to what's in my head. So why do I have to be ashamed of that?
  - acedTrex 6d ago
    > And why can't that apply to people who use generative AI? Because they did not do anything? Theres nothing to celebrate, no skill to honor, no sweat and tears to salute. It just exists
    - properbrew 6d ago
      Is that because they didn't type code on the keyboard? They still had to think of an idea, conceptualise it, work and prompt AI, test the results, alter things, work through problems, stick to a direction and bring about something from nothing. Sure your one shot generic websites don't really have any "skill" or "honour", I may as well just read a text file of what you wanted to say (and I'd prefer that), but to say there is no sweat, tears or skill to using _any_ generative AI is a little bit narrow minded.
    - 59percentmore 6d ago
      >Theres nothing to celebrate, no skill to honor, no sweat and tears to salute. I don't care about any of that. I just want people to be able to see what's in my mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible.
      - rafabulsing 6d ago
        The thing, which anyone who's ever done any type of art realizes, is that 99% of the time, there isn't really such a thing as a high fidelity image in your mind's eye. You feel like there is... But the minute you try to bring it into creation, you find out just how absurdly fuzzy it really is. A non-artist might believe that the failure of bringing your mind image to life is a failure of _skill_. That you are just physically incapable of accurately reproducing the thing you're picturing in your head. While that might well be a factor, it's never the whole story. That's most clear with writing. Anyone who's ever written anything of substance has had the experience of having what feels like a pretty solid story/thesis/whatever. But the minute you try actually writing, you realize just how fuzzy that idea really was. You have to work and labor at it to make it become something coherent. It's not a limitation in mechanical skill: typing absolute non-sense is exactly the same difficulty as typing the a NYT best seller. The difficulty is in the deciding what to type. A huge portion of art is in that part of the process. Exploring ways to bring into existence not _the image you had in your mind_, because there's no such thing. But to bring into existence something that makes you _feel_ the same way the fuzzy idea in your head made you feel. And that's the thing that AI does not, and fundamentally cannot, give you. All the innumerable micro choices your mind does as you try to gradient descend that raw log of wood into the carving of a bear. Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing. I'm not even saying that it's not valuable or useful, it certainly can be. But it's fundamentally not _art_. That's the reason Rick Rubin, for all the praise he (deservedly!) gets for all his work, does not describe himself an _artist_. It's just not the thing he is doing. He doesn't create, he evaluates. And if you take that for what it is, that's absolutely fine, great even, when you're as good as he is. But if you believe the evaluating is, as you put, "seeing what's in your mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible", that's simply untrue. And it _cannot_ be true, because there isn't actually a thing that's in your mind's eye in a way that would allow for that, regardless of whether you're using AI or creating it by hand. Using AI just gives you the illusion that there ever was such a thing.
dist-epoch 7d ago
There is an old saying in creative fields, long before AI: you can make art, or you can make money. It's rare that you can combine the two.
- MachineMan 7d ago
  Not to derail the conversation, but the concept of money itself is on loose screws. One might argue that compute and energy (dare I say expressed in BTC?) is arguably the (world reserve) currency of the future. The current system discounts the value of the hours of the artist based on where that artist was born, rather than on merit, and is the source of a lot of problems including trade wars, extreme globalization, offshoring, mercantilism and the entire industrial stripping of developed nations by those who purposely keep their currencies low and exploit their own population.
  - Applejinx 6d ago
    You can say it, and there's no reason you shouldn't dare say it, but getting other people to believe it is a whole other story. Good luck with that. Guess we know what's in your wallet :)
  - 59percentmore 6d ago
    The petrodollar is already value expressed in energy. It's not as pure as BTC, because of geopolitical pressures and since it's sovereign fiat that can be (and has been) printed into nigh-unrecognizability... But BTC is itself warped by derivatives markets, grossly unequal distribution leading to market manipulation, etc. We're not so different, he and me.
adrianN 7d ago
Very skilled assembly programmers still can beat compilers, but nearly no assembly is written by humans anymore.
- realaleris149 7d ago
  Do they? It might have been true month ago, not sure right now.
  - tux3 7d ago
    Of course. Auto-vectorization isn't magic, for one. In any video codec, the hot kernels will all be in hand-written assembly. Now I'm not saying AI can't write ASM. I'm saying that compilers have a hard job. They output bad assembly, because the task is difficult.
    - cachvico 6d ago
      I find it hard to believe that the output of modern compilers is objectively 'bad assembly'.
      - mbStavola 6d ago
        They are not saying the assembly is bad all the time, but merely that sometimes, for some inputs, the assembly is bad. Which is definitely true, though I would prefer the term "suboptimal." Again, to the OP's point, look at any of the ultra optimized video codecs. You will often find hand rolled assembly to squeeze out that extra bit of perf; having the compiler do its job would probably emit something that does the job, but you can absolutely spend the extra time to do it yourself and do it better.
- layer8 7d ago
  This is a tired non-analogy.
- ungovernableCat 7d ago
  I'm too young to have known the assembly wizard world, but how is the job market for people of that skill-set and expertise? My assumption was that being closer to hardware tends to be more resistant to AI hype since they work in environments where just vibe coding some slop carries much higher risk than vibe coding a webpage or mobile app does.
whstl 7d ago
Someone once told me "Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book." People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI. There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete". But that was the reality before, with the stream of criticism directed at people writing game engines, of doing new programming languages, new web frameworks, or anything new really.
- imdsm 6d ago
  This is interesting because it mixes the process with the reward in an inverse way to what I see from AI pro/con. Those who like writing code have seemed to me to lose out in status from the introduction of AI, while those such as myself who care little for status have used AI more and gained from it. Conversely, those who like writing aren't always about the reward (being an author, having a book published) but those who would like to have written a book regardless of the writing, often are. Interesting mix.
  - inquirerGeneral 6d ago
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  - Chris2048 6d ago
    You contrast "like writing code" with "care little for status", but they are not the same things; as are having status, and caring about it.
- socalgal2 6d ago
  I just see it as tool. Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense. I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back. Construction went from using a tap-and-die to make your own screws, now CnC machines, 3d printers, power drills, etc.... LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project. I really don't get the hate. Was I proud to write my own linked-list library and red-black tree system in the late 80s. Sure. And yet I was much happier when it was just a built in part of the language. I'm really happy I can draw something in a drawing program and not have to sketch it on graph paper like I did in the 80s and manually convert the image to hex codes Each step removed one more piece of friction. I'm not trying to tell you what to like. If you like certain activities be my guest. I like to cook sometimes even though ordering out would be easier. All I'm saying is I don't get the hate that something got easier. We have 1000s of examples fo things getting easier horses -> cars, wagon -> trucks, ships -> planes, oil paints -> photos, math -> spreadsheets, etc... So LLM made yet another thing easier. If you didn't complain about those other things getting easier, why are you complaining now? --- I find it interesting there's a post about inverse kinetics which is could be argued is "how to automate animation" or "how get rid of animators" or "how to make lots of animation less tedious" It's celebrated. Yet LLMs doing the similar things for coding is derided.
molteanu 7d ago
I did. I did think I enjoyed the craft. Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Except burnout. That did come my way. A good question.
shissyboy 7d ago
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iamcalledrob 7d ago
Personally, I think a lot of the enjoyment comes from learning to overcome challenges. Jumping in to an unfamiliar problem space, sucking at it, then grinding until it all clicks. Generative AI takes away the grind, which takes away the learning. How do I master a new language if I'm expected to code via an LLM from day 1? It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens. You have new ideas, opinions form, and so on. I think it's the same with writing code. But when you're not writing code any more, you don't go through this process. I wonder if an LLM-authored project would even end up solving the same problems that a human-authored project would? If a human didn't write the code, then a human didn't have the chance to think in the same way. They didn't spend time trying to think of a good variable name, which made them realise the whole premise was wrong...
- cmiles74 6d ago
  Agreed, there may be people working with their LLM tool to learn something new. In my experience this isn’t the way these tools are marketed, from where I sit it looks like this is being discouraged. If you aren’t really learning anything then all you get at the end is the product. For a certain type of person this is just not enough. I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.
  - ryandrake 6d ago
    Someone on Twitter put it well: using an LLM to learn is like using a forklift to lift weights in the gym. Yes, action is happening but the point of going to the gym is not to ensure weights get displaced up and down.
    - heddhunter 6d ago
      That's a bizarre analogy. If you're actually committed to learning (vs having the LLM spit out code you don't read), using an LLM as a teacher is more like working out using weight machines vs dumbbells. Just two different methods of arriving at the same destination, with different pros and cons.
bbor 7d ago
Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? I'm sorry... I'm trying to be respectful, but I find this comment highly combative and disrespectful beneath a professional veneer. Implying that the opposition --people who also use deep neural networks to make games instead of just using the huge set of tools that no one human could ever understand in full but aren't usually called "AI" anymore-- is lacking in intrinsic value, deep thinking, or soul is typical, but the accusation that they're just bad-faith jerks who only care about being complimented is new and frankly absurd. Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? I think it should be obvious in hindsight that this is a false dichotomy, to say the very least. Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? This part is also leaning hard on vague terms, on top of being another false dichotomy. Do I enjoy typing? Not particularly, tho vim is fun. Do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of "I would still love to make software even if I never got to run it"? Probably not, but who does? And finally, do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of engineering software? Yes of course, but isn't engineering intrinsically tied to specifications and their verification, AKA "the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life"? it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better. This exact same argument applies to writing in assembly; just like in that historical case, the rebuttal is to point out how fleeting this situation is. That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering? *TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.
- _factor 7d ago
  Did you read the article?
aniviacat 7d ago
I don't think that fully captures the situation. My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes. However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do not believe so. I believe that even if you are doing a craft purely out of passion, it is still important to gain value out of the fruits of your labor, be it ever so little.
- npilk 6d ago
  In this analogy, your mother probably gets enjoyment out eating the tomatoes herself, or maybe giving a few to friends. Technology wouldn't cause her plants to stop growing. But she couldn't support herself full-time as a tomato grower competing against large farms with hydroponics. So maybe the extension is that professional SWEs who work at big corporations will need to use AI to 'keep up', but hobbyists can still get enjoyment out of their own work at hobby scale without using AI (similar to the point in TFA).
- srdjanr 6d ago
  I think it captures it perfectly, and the question is what are tomatoes here. Is it being challenged intellectually and proud of solving a puzzle, or is it getting praised, valued or paid? People didn't stop solving sudokus when sudoku solvers appeared.
  - jodrellblank 6d ago
    Although Peter Norvig thought they should https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096922
- fasterik 6d ago
  I agree with your analogy, but I don't understand the last part. If I'm working on a hobby project, say a video game, the "tomatoes" I get are the experiences of writing code, playing a level I designed, and sharing it with my friends. The advent of AI doesn't reduce the value of those experiences or make them go away.
0xpgm 7d ago
> Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? I think in the end everyone will be happy. Those who just want to ship, make money and attain status and do not care much for the process will embrace whatever capabilities AI affords them and move on. Those who get satisfaction from the process and prioritize craftsmanship will also do so and form their own subcultures where this is appreciated. If software is eating the world as some say, then surely, there can't be just one way of doing software.
- GeneralMayhem 6d ago
  Except that there are finite hours in the day. I enjoy the process and craft very much, but I also enjoy making high tech salaries. Up until a year or so ago, those weren't contradictory, because the craft paid well. Now, continuing to be employed in an AI-dominated industry means that I can no longer practice my craft at work most days. So now I need to find the motivation to do it in my spare time - and this while the work hours are significantly more emotionally and motivationally draining because it's less fulfilling. If I switched to spending more time on the hobbyist craft, I would pretty quickly have to give up doing well at the job. And the parts of the craft I enjoyed the most are the puzzles around distributed systems and high-scale correctness, which tend not to come up in the hobbyist context anyway.
  - 59percentmore 6d ago
    Welcome to the world everyone else has to muddle through. The solution has long been, and remains, "Organize and demand enough money to live on from ~20 hours of employed labor a week, spend the rest of the time as you'd like."
    - GeneralMayhem 6d ago
      Sure, I acknowledge that it was incredibly rare and lucky for "the thing I enjoy doing" and "the thing that pays" to have been the same for so long. That doesn't mean it's not painful for that to change out from under me - especially when I can't quite convince myself that the new way of doing things is actually better by any metric.
imdsm 7d ago
This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. The feeling I get is that they haven't earned it, that they've not put in the years to learn it and now they get to make things. I spent 25 years programming, from 2000-2025. I always thought that the number would keep going up, one day I'd say three decades, four decades, but I've stopped counting. I don't program anymore. I started using GitHub Copilot in the beta in 2021 ish, where we turned comments into lines of code, then functions, was there the night ChatGPT dropped as a free preview in 22, trialed cursor on its first release, all the way up to now using both ChatGPT & Claude CLI & apps daily. My slowing down of writing code happened gradually, but from copilot I was hooked, I could do more, quicker. And now, I don't write any code, I just build the systems around agents & processes. I'm okay with that because my thought has always been that we bring value. If we don't have to write a single line of code to bring an org value, we're doing a great job. And now that's almost true. The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value. In a way, I think you're right, was it always just about the power & compliments for some people? The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians? And has AI broken that stranglehold?
- daveguy 5d ago
  One question: did you jump straight from programming to depending on the AI without looking at the code? If so, I've got some bad news for you.
- cmiles74 6d ago
  I’m sure there is some of that, people looking back at years of learning a skill, maybe even turning it into a productive career, and being upset that anyone can pay for an LLM tool and get output they believe is comparable. In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doing things, the satisfaction in putting together a solution that fits in just right and gets the job done. The feeling of goals accomplished and having improved oneself. These are things that are still out there, and the work is still valuable. The difference, for me, is this constant background conversation that seems to be saying “this is worthless” and “you’re wasting your time”. I don’t think this is true but it’s hard to hear. Depending on where a person is in life, it can hit pretty hard.
masswerk 6d ago
The first paragraph kind of reads like an inverse of Kant's criteria for a moral action: are you sure that there was no enjoyment, no pleasure was involved in this action or resulted from it? At the same time, it kind of establishes the ethics of self-entertainment, and by this, maybe, an imperative of joyless joy? It kind of echos 19th century 'accomplishment', a modest self-entertainment by the fruits of virtuos learning and training, while with kind of a consumerist twist, as this now involves the use and "modest" development of technology, which introduces an external, social dependency, which it at the same time tries to eclipse. Meaning, I think, besides utilitarian one-time, one-purpose scripts, programming is essentially an at least potentially social activity, there's always a potential social horizon to it. Just like with any other activity that aims at a work.
- masswerk 6d ago
  PS: For the those seeking comfort in literature, we get some discussion on accomplishment in the work of Jane Austen, as in a worthy and virtuous entertainment for young gentlewomen, accomplishment for display, "true" accomplishment, as an ability to entertain oneself under conditions of intellectual austerity, means of intellectual independence, etc. Not to the least in "Pride and Prejudice", where accomplishment is discussed as a sibling and foil to Darcy's male conception of inner moral virtue, which, in fact, amounts to an socio-economic Regency scandal, as he entirely ignores his first-born duties in good-natured impulsiveness, bad decision making and short-sighted expenses, which an entire middle class depends on. (Is there a similar side to accomplishment?) Notably, this was written at a similar time, when fortunes made from trade and a new kind of availability of manufactured goods was turning the (paper mache) table, in terms of what may be a good and fulfilled life and a worthwhile activity.
LogicFailsMe 6d ago
One thing to note is that as soon as Suno figured out hiphop artists were making $150,000 a year spewing AI songs onto Spotify, they imposed a 60 song per month download limit to stop that. It won't, they'll just do analog recordings and remaster them with Codex, but it's pretty clear that anyone who finds a market inefficiency here will find that inefficiency addressed forthwith to keep the casino rigged in favor of the owners.
SecretDreams 6d ago
Fack, hopefully it's better than Ikea vs carpenter or most people will need new jobs because most "customers" are just buying Ikea all day.
- eszed 6d ago
  Dude, I think it's worse. Some carpenters still make a living creating high-end furniture, or straight-up art pieces. I can't quite imagine a future where a hand-crafted app will ever be a status-symbol. The people who love coding for code's sake are (economically) screwed.
deleted 6d ago
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CuriouslyC 6d ago
A CNC machine will beat a whittler every time. If a craft is only about technical execution, AI is going to own it. The crafts that are safe are the ones that elicit/depend upon a complex human response that's not easily predictable from its parts.
- ricardobayes 6d ago
  Looks like teaching is about to become the "it" profession and might become insanely competitive.
  - beej71 6d ago
    That's a definite maybe. You can bet there's a general movement afoot to replace teachers with AI because it's cheaper and always available, etc. Also, measuring the human advantage is difficult.
    - ricardobayes 6d ago
      I would refute that since it's obvious (using a strong word here), that digital anything in the classroom is really bad[0] and consistently led to lower PISA scores. Perhaps there will be some initial changes in the wrong direction with more digitalization but eventually common sense is going to prevail. And concerned mom groups are incredibly powerful these days. Parents are going to freak out the moment a recording AI (or an androgenous teaching robot) is going to be introduced in the classroom. [0]: https://www.upworthy.com/gen-z-technology-schools-ex1-2/ https://www.upworthy.com/gen-z-technology-schools-ex1-2/
      - beej71 5d ago
        I absolutely agree with you. Unfortunately, those decisions are above my pay grade. But here's hoping the moms can drive the point home!
  - pastel8739 6d ago
    This doesn’t really seem obvious to me at all. It seems to me that skills overall are being devalued, and so then will be teachers (even more than they already are). Why do you think this?
kalcode 6d ago
What I do for work, isn't the same as what I do for fun. I think others need to embrace that too. Your work can be fun, and can be a joy. But that shouldn't be folks only outlet for themselves to measure. At one point in my career I was ONLY reviewing and guiding off-shore contractors. It felt even worse than LLMs. But I did enjoy it though, but going to LLMs didn't drastically change my workflow. LLMs feel like leading a bunch of juniors with no real stake or business context. So for me it didn't fundamentally change things, it just meant I could steer the progress before a PR is created later in the week that misses the mark completely. There were plenty of other issues in the software development business that sucks the soul of creating out. So I think you asking the right questions. Cause I felt like I've asked myself those questions even before LLMs.
hgoel 6d ago
I don't get it, you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do. As if you'd be happy to just write anything as long as you were allowed to manually type everything out. On top of that there's the "did you enjoy the craft or did you enjoy the compliments" framing. Are people who use pre-existing libraries just fishing for compliments too? No, of course not, they're making a cost-benefit analysis and deciding that certain tasks are better off delegated rather than repeated by hand. Same goes for choosing when to use AI. Not everything in every project justifies full human effort, regardless of how much those humans enjoy their craft. Many of the other replies have referenced the arts, but I think a better example would be research. Scientists have constantly been in a position where improvements in technology shift the nature of their work without being able to change what they fundamentally do. They might enjoy the art of manually calibrating an instrument to extreme precision, but ultimately their craft is to do research. If the auto-calibration is going to be sufficient for their experiment's needs, there's no reason to waste time doing a manual calibration. Yet, not requiring extreme precision does not mean the experiment's results have no scientific value, nor does it reflect on their dedication towards their craft.
- beej71 6d ago
  > you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do Can't speak for the OP but I definite care what my code is supposed to do. :) The last little program I wrote was a 40-line thing to compute my estimated quarterly taxes so I wouldn't have to launch a spreadsheet. It had better work right! I could have used an LLM to write it, but that would have been boring as hell. Got no compliments for it. No one has even seen it. I don't care; it was just relaxing and fun to code.
- bigstrat2003 6d ago
  > I don't get it, you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do. As if you'd be happy to just write anything as long as you were allowed to manually type everything out. Yes. I enjoy programming, and I don't care at all about the end result (unless it's something immoral which I wouldn't wish to be a part of). I don't think that should be so surprising to you.
argentinian 6d ago
If programming was used to temporarily increase one's self esteem from it then it's not a problem with the IAs, but a psychological problem. The problem is valuing a human being because of what they produce and not recognizing intrinsic value. The same situation could have happened in a different profession when automation replaced it, it's not about IA.
DidntUseIt 6d ago
Yep, calculator, etc. A lot of random abstract comments like this about AI. Share anecdotes and examples if you have any
watwut 6d ago
Of course most creators actually enjoy craft, do enjoy compliments and find them motivating ... and need money and want money. There is no special introspection requires, unless you are signing up for "all people are one-dimensional simpletons" theory of mind. Which ia simply incorrect theory of mind, useful only when one wants to score cheap rhetorical win.
crawfordcomeaux 6d ago
We all have intrinsic value being threatened by these systems and technologists (particularly systems/software engineers and programmers) have a responsibility to build systems to help humans meet their everyday needs without or with minimal oppression (only as a stepping stone to full removal/prevention). Chasing the feelings is a distraction game everyone is doing using their preferred fields/hobbies. Now is the time to gather and reorganize because the oppressors are for sure doing it.
acedTrex 6d ago
> I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch I appreciate this statement, it really hammers home some of the differences ive been feeling from the analogy. You put it in words better.
1dom 6d ago
> PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply. I appreciated this, but I feel the crux of the issue is this is only true with painful caveats. If you're a "computer carpenter" (massive nerd), that massive nerdiness was almost like a scarce asset in the professional world that appeared only after a life involving thousands of solitary hours from a young age in front of a computer screen. That asset has been somewhat synthesized now. The asset of being able to quickly understand and produce a solution appropriate for a large technical system is now _significantly_ less scarce for businesses. Sure, we still have our intrinsic value, but that's going to get increasingly less fun to convert into the sort of value necessary to pay bills.
- dasil003 6d ago
  I think the nerdiness is still a huge asset, because what I've seen is that technical people are the ones whos ceiling is raised the most by AI. Sure, anyone can make a flashy demo now, and so the signaling value of being able to create something like that is gone, not to mention flashy demos themselves have lost 90% of the wow factor overnight and will continue to plummet. But in a way these superficial perception shifts that don't actually impact the fundamental value of technical expertise as much as it seems. Yes, it does affect your ability to pull a high paycheck purely from nuts and bolts code slinging—I would argue that was an especially privileged moat over the last 20 years powered by the rise of FAANG. Programmers before that era did not make anywhere near the salaries of the 2010s, and other more serious engineering disciplines never have and never will make that kind of money. So sure, pour one out for the salad days, but also it helps to have some perspective. But why I think software engineers will be fine is this: most people simply do not have the patience, discipline, or frankly interest in thinking deeply about how anything should work. If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product. The amount of software is only increasing, and being able to intuitively understand what computers and systems (including human processes!) can actually do, and distinguish from the magical thinking will only increase in value. The job will change for sure, but when the dust settles I believe the outcome is many more software engineers will have replaced their product managers than vice versa.
hirvi74 6d ago
Regarding programming, I would say my answer would be yes to all of your questions. I think all of those feelings and pleasures can exist simultaneously. Though, I believe you are touching on a point that is common in Buddhism. Attachment leads to suffering. Many of us, myself included, are attached to the identity of being a programmer. I would by lying if I said I did not have bittersweet feelings about the future. But I try to always remind myself about the impermanence of everything in the universe. Even if LLMs never existed, there would be a day when I write my final line of code. The day may come sooner than I once imagined, but it was always destined. I think it is important to be mindful of the present as well. I can still program currently. I was programming minutes before righting this comment. Thus, it is imperative that I spend some time relishing in the fact that I still am healthy and capable enough to program. I have not been replaced yet. I still feel an abundance of gratitude and satisfaction.
- MachineMan 6d ago
  Great comment. Was it really ever ours or do we merely give back what Prometheus stole from the Gods?
chorizo 6d ago
Honestly, enjoying the craft hasn’t resulted in a career related to it. My real job and chores take up most of my capacity, leaving little to enjoy the craft. But now with AI, I can play with crafting as if it was a video game. The end results, which nowhere near is satisfying, is better than nothing. Coding with AI feels gamified and simulated, but still somehow creates useful outcomes.
e584 6d ago
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qarl 6d ago
As a creator - I am delighted that I can now create at about 20X the rate of what I could before. Maybe more. I have produced more cool shit in the last 6 months than I have in the preceding 10 years. It's an amazing time to be alive.
abustamam 6d ago
I'm building an app to help me manage my Toastmasters clubs. I'm using AI to do it because I honestly dont care how it's made, I'm the only user right now. I just want it to work. Thus far AI has allowed me to generate power points for meetings, pdf generation for agendas, smart role assignments, CMS for reaching out to guests to join, speech tracking, and a lot of other neat stuff. Could I have done it without AI? Probably, but again its a hobby. It would have taken me a lot more time and effort to design and figure this out. Someone else could have built something like this (with or without AI), and indeed many similar products exist, but theyre either paid solutions or just dont work the way I want it to. I showed this to a few other Toastmasters and they would want to use it for their own clubs. The way i see it, software is just a means to an end. I have over a decade of Toastmasters experience and have been involved in many clubs so I think my intrinsic knowledge and experience IS my value, not the software. If anything, AI helped me unleash more of my value to Toastmasters as a provider of a tool, rather than as my career as a software engineer.
0x69420 6d ago
not that it was necessarily the intent, but you laid on the "PS: you have intrinsic value" with the exact same tone and cadence as someone trying to work in a "you are loved/valued" while trying to talk someone off the tenth-floor railing. jesus, it's really bleak out there, huh.

Fraterkes 7d ago

One of the big points of art is expressing something to other people. Tired of this sort of shallow dismissal where wanting recognition, or for your art to reach people is cast as a kind of vanity that real artists ought to get over.

FeteCommuniste 7d ago
Exactly. Motivation is rarely a question of either/or (art for art's sake / art for recognition). And for many practitioners, being part of a community of fellow artists who "know the struggle" is also part of the fun.
- mcluck 6d ago
  "Knowing the struggle" is/was a massive part of my enjoyment of programming. I used to love browsing Github just to see what people were building and really appreciating clever ideas or the amount of work required to make something, especially when it's something of limited commercial value. Now I feel like I've lost that. So it's not just that I don't get appreciation for my work but I find it's harder to appreciate other people's work.
- CuriouslyC 6d ago
  There will always be communities of people who want to handcraft everything, who will be available to commiserate about the struggle of their craft. We still have people doing crazy shit like collecting/smelting iron by hand and smithing it into swords (which will literally never be used).
  - FeteCommuniste 6d ago
    Probably, just like now where there are still small groups of hobbyist programmers who write in little-used languages for obscure old platforms hardly anyone else cares about. But I think it's perfectly fair to mourn the prospect of something that used to be both your passion and livelihood get pushed to some dusty niche corner of the tech landscape.
nrjames 7d ago
I don't think that an artist or game developer wanting recognition is the problem here. I think it's the reflection of their intentions on the consumer in an environment where it's increasingly difficult to separate the cash grabs from the craft.
card_zero 6d ago
Yeah, I wanted to say that too. You can't (always) separate enjoying the craft from enjoying the praise. People too often talk about the value of an art object divorced from its provenance, as if you could measure its goodness with a meter, instead of the value of the audience relating to the personality expressed in it, which means it's a communication, and the communication isn't all one-way. When you're crafting something you're initiating that communication. Of course you want praise, or distressed complaints or anyway some reaction.
- eszed 6d ago
  I agree with all of that, but I think there's a bit of "ball-hiding" going on in most of these conversations. It isn't only that programmers crave(d) praise or social recognition (though maybe that's it for some), but they're also having to come to terms with the fact that their "art-form" suddenly has much, much less economic value. They were able, for a long time, to (and I say this absolutely non-pejoratively - in fact, just the opposite) have their cake and eat it too, by being virtually guaranteed to make a living (in practice, in the demographic most represented on this board, a very good one) doing a thing they love to do. It's gauche, in Anglo-Saxon countries, to talk openly about one's own financial circumstances, so that mostly doesn't get raised in these threads, but I can hear it in the background of most of them, like "whaddya mean no one's gonna pay me to solve interesting problems with code any more? Now I've gotta do that, if I'm ever going to do that at all, in my spare time, for free?" And I so, so, so sympathize with that. I devoted 25 years of my life to the performing arts, from which - as a very unattached young man - I was able scrape an exceedingly frugal living. That, in the arts, is a success story - the vast majority make no living from doing it at all, in fact probably the reverse. Coders arguably have it worse: it's hard to see anyone making any money from "writing code", ever again. It's not surprising to me that they're confused and hurt right now: they have, quickly, sadly, and unexpectedly been pushed into the economic corner other artists always have occupied.
  - Chris2048 6d ago
    > their "art-form" suddenly has much, much less economic value Can you define art/artist? If software is art, then what profession isn't? Software still has value, specifically utility, it's just cheaper to produce, its market value is lower. How is that comparable to the arts?
CuriouslyC 6d ago
The nuance here is that people aren't good at evaluating their own work/progress, and use recognition as a proxy milestone of their own improvement. No matter how good they get, they don't "feel" good until someone else (or many someones) comes and tells them "you're good"
59percentmore 6d ago
And why can't that apply to people who use generative AI? Expression isn't about seeking recognition, in the sense of clout or popularity, it's simply a matter of "I want other people to be able to see what I see." If I compare what I'm able to produce by hand, and what I'm able to get the computer to spit out, it's pretty clear to me which is closest to what's in my head. So why do I have to be ashamed of that?
- acedTrex 6d ago
  > And why can't that apply to people who use generative AI? Because they did not do anything? Theres nothing to celebrate, no skill to honor, no sweat and tears to salute. It just exists
  - properbrew 6d ago
    Is that because they didn't type code on the keyboard? They still had to think of an idea, conceptualise it, work and prompt AI, test the results, alter things, work through problems, stick to a direction and bring about something from nothing. Sure your one shot generic websites don't really have any "skill" or "honour", I may as well just read a text file of what you wanted to say (and I'd prefer that), but to say there is no sweat, tears or skill to using _any_ generative AI is a little bit narrow minded.
  - 59percentmore 6d ago
    >Theres nothing to celebrate, no skill to honor, no sweat and tears to salute. I don't care about any of that. I just want people to be able to see what's in my mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible.
    - rafabulsing 6d ago
      The thing, which anyone who's ever done any type of art realizes, is that 99% of the time, there isn't really such a thing as a high fidelity image in your mind's eye. You feel like there is... But the minute you try to bring it into creation, you find out just how absurdly fuzzy it really is. A non-artist might believe that the failure of bringing your mind image to life is a failure of _skill_. That you are just physically incapable of accurately reproducing the thing you're picturing in your head. While that might well be a factor, it's never the whole story. That's most clear with writing. Anyone who's ever written anything of substance has had the experience of having what feels like a pretty solid story/thesis/whatever. But the minute you try actually writing, you realize just how fuzzy that idea really was. You have to work and labor at it to make it become something coherent. It's not a limitation in mechanical skill: typing absolute non-sense is exactly the same difficulty as typing the a NYT best seller. The difficulty is in the deciding what to type. A huge portion of art is in that part of the process. Exploring ways to bring into existence not _the image you had in your mind_, because there's no such thing. But to bring into existence something that makes you _feel_ the same way the fuzzy idea in your head made you feel. And that's the thing that AI does not, and fundamentally cannot, give you. All the innumerable micro choices your mind does as you try to gradient descend that raw log of wood into the carving of a bear. Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing. I'm not even saying that it's not valuable or useful, it certainly can be. But it's fundamentally not _art_. That's the reason Rick Rubin, for all the praise he (deservedly!) gets for all his work, does not describe himself an _artist_. It's just not the thing he is doing. He doesn't create, he evaluates. And if you take that for what it is, that's absolutely fine, great even, when you're as good as he is. But if you believe the evaluating is, as you put, "seeing what's in your mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible", that's simply untrue. And it _cannot_ be true, because there isn't actually a thing that's in your mind's eye in a way that would allow for that, regardless of whether you're using AI or creating it by hand. Using AI just gives you the illusion that there ever was such a thing.

dist-epoch 7d ago

There is an old saying in creative fields, long before AI: you can make art, or you can make money. It's rare that you can combine the two.

MachineMan 7d ago
Not to derail the conversation, but the concept of money itself is on loose screws. One might argue that compute and energy (dare I say expressed in BTC?) is arguably the (world reserve) currency of the future. The current system discounts the value of the hours of the artist based on where that artist was born, rather than on merit, and is the source of a lot of problems including trade wars, extreme globalization, offshoring, mercantilism and the entire industrial stripping of developed nations by those who purposely keep their currencies low and exploit their own population.
- Applejinx 6d ago
  You can say it, and there's no reason you shouldn't dare say it, but getting other people to believe it is a whole other story. Good luck with that. Guess we know what's in your wallet :)
- 59percentmore 6d ago
  The petrodollar is already value expressed in energy. It's not as pure as BTC, because of geopolitical pressures and since it's sovereign fiat that can be (and has been) printed into nigh-unrecognizability... But BTC is itself warped by derivatives markets, grossly unequal distribution leading to market manipulation, etc. We're not so different, he and me.

adrianN 7d ago

Very skilled assembly programmers still can beat compilers, but nearly no assembly is written by humans anymore.

realaleris149 7d ago
Do they? It might have been true month ago, not sure right now.
- tux3 7d ago
  Of course. Auto-vectorization isn't magic, for one. In any video codec, the hot kernels will all be in hand-written assembly. Now I'm not saying AI can't write ASM. I'm saying that compilers have a hard job. They output bad assembly, because the task is difficult.
  - cachvico 6d ago
    I find it hard to believe that the output of modern compilers is objectively 'bad assembly'.
    - mbStavola 6d ago
      They are not saying the assembly is bad all the time, but merely that sometimes, for some inputs, the assembly is bad. Which is definitely true, though I would prefer the term "suboptimal." Again, to the OP's point, look at any of the ultra optimized video codecs. You will often find hand rolled assembly to squeeze out that extra bit of perf; having the compiler do its job would probably emit something that does the job, but you can absolutely spend the extra time to do it yourself and do it better.
layer8 7d ago
This is a tired non-analogy.
ungovernableCat 7d ago
I'm too young to have known the assembly wizard world, but how is the job market for people of that skill-set and expertise? My assumption was that being closer to hardware tends to be more resistant to AI hype since they work in environments where just vibe coding some slop carries much higher risk than vibe coding a webpage or mobile app does.

whstl 7d ago

Someone once told me "Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book." People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI. There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete". But that was the reality before, with the stream of criticism directed at people writing game engines, of doing new programming languages, new web frameworks, or anything new really.

imdsm 6d ago
This is interesting because it mixes the process with the reward in an inverse way to what I see from AI pro/con. Those who like writing code have seemed to me to lose out in status from the introduction of AI, while those such as myself who care little for status have used AI more and gained from it. Conversely, those who like writing aren't always about the reward (being an author, having a book published) but those who would like to have written a book regardless of the writing, often are. Interesting mix.
- inquirerGeneral 6d ago
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- Chris2048 6d ago
  You contrast "like writing code" with "care little for status", but they are not the same things; as are having status, and caring about it.
socalgal2 6d ago
I just see it as tool. Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense. I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back. Construction went from using a tap-and-die to make your own screws, now CnC machines, 3d printers, power drills, etc.... LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project. I really don't get the hate. Was I proud to write my own linked-list library and red-black tree system in the late 80s. Sure. And yet I was much happier when it was just a built in part of the language. I'm really happy I can draw something in a drawing program and not have to sketch it on graph paper like I did in the 80s and manually convert the image to hex codes Each step removed one more piece of friction. I'm not trying to tell you what to like. If you like certain activities be my guest. I like to cook sometimes even though ordering out would be easier. All I'm saying is I don't get the hate that something got easier. We have 1000s of examples fo things getting easier horses -> cars, wagon -> trucks, ships -> planes, oil paints -> photos, math -> spreadsheets, etc... So LLM made yet another thing easier. If you didn't complain about those other things getting easier, why are you complaining now? --- I find it interesting there's a post about inverse kinetics which is could be argued is "how to automate animation" or "how get rid of animators" or "how to make lots of animation less tedious" It's celebrated. Yet LLMs doing the similar things for coding is derided.

molteanu 7d ago

I did. I did think I enjoyed the craft. Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Except burnout. That did come my way. A good question.

shissyboy 7d ago

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iamcalledrob 7d ago

Personally, I think a lot of the enjoyment comes from learning to overcome challenges. Jumping in to an unfamiliar problem space, sucking at it, then grinding until it all clicks. Generative AI takes away the grind, which takes away the learning. How do I master a new language if I'm expected to code via an LLM from day 1? It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens. You have new ideas, opinions form, and so on. I think it's the same with writing code. But when you're not writing code any more, you don't go through this process. I wonder if an LLM-authored project would even end up solving the same problems that a human-authored project would? If a human didn't write the code, then a human didn't have the chance to think in the same way. They didn't spend time trying to think of a good variable name, which made them realise the whole premise was wrong...

cmiles74 6d ago
Agreed, there may be people working with their LLM tool to learn something new. In my experience this isn’t the way these tools are marketed, from where I sit it looks like this is being discouraged. If you aren’t really learning anything then all you get at the end is the product. For a certain type of person this is just not enough. I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.
- ryandrake 6d ago
  Someone on Twitter put it well: using an LLM to learn is like using a forklift to lift weights in the gym. Yes, action is happening but the point of going to the gym is not to ensure weights get displaced up and down.
  - heddhunter 6d ago
    That's a bizarre analogy. If you're actually committed to learning (vs having the LLM spit out code you don't read), using an LLM as a teacher is more like working out using weight machines vs dumbbells. Just two different methods of arriving at the same destination, with different pros and cons.

bbor 7d ago

Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? I'm sorry... I'm trying to be respectful, but I find this comment highly combative and disrespectful beneath a professional veneer. Implying that the opposition --people who also use deep neural networks to make games instead of just using the huge set of tools that no one human could ever understand in full but aren't usually called "AI" anymore-- is lacking in intrinsic value, deep thinking, or soul is typical, but the accusation that they're just bad-faith jerks who only care about being complimented is new and frankly absurd. Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? I think it should be obvious in hindsight that this is a false dichotomy, to say the very least. Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? This part is also leaning hard on vague terms, on top of being another false dichotomy. Do I enjoy typing? Not particularly, tho vim is fun. Do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of "I would still love to make software even if I never got to run it"? Probably not, but who does? And finally, do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of engineering software? Yes of course, but isn't engineering intrinsically tied to specifications and their verification, AKA "the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life"? it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better. This exact same argument applies to writing in assembly; just like in that historical case, the rebuttal is to point out how fleeting this situation is. That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering? *TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.

_factor 7d ago
Did you read the article?

aniviacat 7d ago

I don't think that fully captures the situation. My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes. However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do not believe so. I believe that even if you are doing a craft purely out of passion, it is still important to gain value out of the fruits of your labor, be it ever so little.

npilk 6d ago
In this analogy, your mother probably gets enjoyment out eating the tomatoes herself, or maybe giving a few to friends. Technology wouldn't cause her plants to stop growing. But she couldn't support herself full-time as a tomato grower competing against large farms with hydroponics. So maybe the extension is that professional SWEs who work at big corporations will need to use AI to 'keep up', but hobbyists can still get enjoyment out of their own work at hobby scale without using AI (similar to the point in TFA).
srdjanr 6d ago
I think it captures it perfectly, and the question is what are tomatoes here. Is it being challenged intellectually and proud of solving a puzzle, or is it getting praised, valued or paid? People didn't stop solving sudokus when sudoku solvers appeared.
- jodrellblank 6d ago
  Although Peter Norvig thought they should https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096922
fasterik 6d ago
I agree with your analogy, but I don't understand the last part. If I'm working on a hobby project, say a video game, the "tomatoes" I get are the experiences of writing code, playing a level I designed, and sharing it with my friends. The advent of AI doesn't reduce the value of those experiences or make them go away.

0xpgm 7d ago

> Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? I think in the end everyone will be happy. Those who just want to ship, make money and attain status and do not care much for the process will embrace whatever capabilities AI affords them and move on. Those who get satisfaction from the process and prioritize craftsmanship will also do so and form their own subcultures where this is appreciated. If software is eating the world as some say, then surely, there can't be just one way of doing software.

GeneralMayhem 6d ago
Except that there are finite hours in the day. I enjoy the process and craft very much, but I also enjoy making high tech salaries. Up until a year or so ago, those weren't contradictory, because the craft paid well. Now, continuing to be employed in an AI-dominated industry means that I can no longer practice my craft at work most days. So now I need to find the motivation to do it in my spare time - and this while the work hours are significantly more emotionally and motivationally draining because it's less fulfilling. If I switched to spending more time on the hobbyist craft, I would pretty quickly have to give up doing well at the job. And the parts of the craft I enjoyed the most are the puzzles around distributed systems and high-scale correctness, which tend not to come up in the hobbyist context anyway.
- 59percentmore 6d ago
  Welcome to the world everyone else has to muddle through. The solution has long been, and remains, "Organize and demand enough money to live on from ~20 hours of employed labor a week, spend the rest of the time as you'd like."
  - GeneralMayhem 6d ago
    Sure, I acknowledge that it was incredibly rare and lucky for "the thing I enjoy doing" and "the thing that pays" to have been the same for so long. That doesn't mean it's not painful for that to change out from under me - especially when I can't quite convince myself that the new way of doing things is actually better by any metric.

imdsm 7d ago

This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. The feeling I get is that they haven't earned it, that they've not put in the years to learn it and now they get to make things. I spent 25 years programming, from 2000-2025. I always thought that the number would keep going up, one day I'd say three decades, four decades, but I've stopped counting. I don't program anymore. I started using GitHub Copilot in the beta in 2021 ish, where we turned comments into lines of code, then functions, was there the night ChatGPT dropped as a free preview in 22, trialed cursor on its first release, all the way up to now using both ChatGPT & Claude CLI & apps daily. My slowing down of writing code happened gradually, but from copilot I was hooked, I could do more, quicker. And now, I don't write any code, I just build the systems around agents & processes. I'm okay with that because my thought has always been that we bring value. If we don't have to write a single line of code to bring an org value, we're doing a great job. And now that's almost true. The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value. In a way, I think you're right, was it always just about the power & compliments for some people? The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians? And has AI broken that stranglehold?

daveguy 5d ago
One question: did you jump straight from programming to depending on the AI without looking at the code? If so, I've got some bad news for you.
cmiles74 6d ago
I’m sure there is some of that, people looking back at years of learning a skill, maybe even turning it into a productive career, and being upset that anyone can pay for an LLM tool and get output they believe is comparable. In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doing things, the satisfaction in putting together a solution that fits in just right and gets the job done. The feeling of goals accomplished and having improved oneself. These are things that are still out there, and the work is still valuable. The difference, for me, is this constant background conversation that seems to be saying “this is worthless” and “you’re wasting your time”. I don’t think this is true but it’s hard to hear. Depending on where a person is in life, it can hit pretty hard.

masswerk 6d ago

The first paragraph kind of reads like an inverse of Kant's criteria for a moral action: are you sure that there was no enjoyment, no pleasure was involved in this action or resulted from it? At the same time, it kind of establishes the ethics of self-entertainment, and by this, maybe, an imperative of joyless joy? It kind of echos 19th century 'accomplishment', a modest self-entertainment by the fruits of virtuos learning and training, while with kind of a consumerist twist, as this now involves the use and "modest" development of technology, which introduces an external, social dependency, which it at the same time tries to eclipse. Meaning, I think, besides utilitarian one-time, one-purpose scripts, programming is essentially an at least potentially social activity, there's always a potential social horizon to it. Just like with any other activity that aims at a work.

masswerk 6d ago
PS: For the those seeking comfort in literature, we get some discussion on accomplishment in the work of Jane Austen, as in a worthy and virtuous entertainment for young gentlewomen, accomplishment for display, "true" accomplishment, as an ability to entertain oneself under conditions of intellectual austerity, means of intellectual independence, etc. Not to the least in "Pride and Prejudice", where accomplishment is discussed as a sibling and foil to Darcy's male conception of inner moral virtue, which, in fact, amounts to an socio-economic Regency scandal, as he entirely ignores his first-born duties in good-natured impulsiveness, bad decision making and short-sighted expenses, which an entire middle class depends on. (Is there a similar side to accomplishment?) Notably, this was written at a similar time, when fortunes made from trade and a new kind of availability of manufactured goods was turning the (paper mache) table, in terms of what may be a good and fulfilled life and a worthwhile activity.

LogicFailsMe 6d ago

One thing to note is that as soon as Suno figured out hiphop artists were making $150,000 a year spewing AI songs onto Spotify, they imposed a 60 song per month download limit to stop that. It won't, they'll just do analog recordings and remaster them with Codex, but it's pretty clear that anyone who finds a market inefficiency here will find that inefficiency addressed forthwith to keep the casino rigged in favor of the owners.

SecretDreams 6d ago

Fack, hopefully it's better than Ikea vs carpenter or most people will need new jobs because most "customers" are just buying Ikea all day.

eszed 6d ago
Dude, I think it's worse. Some carpenters still make a living creating high-end furniture, or straight-up art pieces. I can't quite imagine a future where a hand-crafted app will ever be a status-symbol. The people who love coding for code's sake are (economically) screwed.

deleted 6d ago

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CuriouslyC 6d ago

A CNC machine will beat a whittler every time. If a craft is only about technical execution, AI is going to own it. The crafts that are safe are the ones that elicit/depend upon a complex human response that's not easily predictable from its parts.

ricardobayes 6d ago
Looks like teaching is about to become the "it" profession and might become insanely competitive.
- beej71 6d ago
  That's a definite maybe. You can bet there's a general movement afoot to replace teachers with AI because it's cheaper and always available, etc. Also, measuring the human advantage is difficult.
  - ricardobayes 6d ago
    I would refute that since it's obvious (using a strong word here), that digital anything in the classroom is really bad[0] and consistently led to lower PISA scores. Perhaps there will be some initial changes in the wrong direction with more digitalization but eventually common sense is going to prevail. And concerned mom groups are incredibly powerful these days. Parents are going to freak out the moment a recording AI (or an androgenous teaching robot) is going to be introduced in the classroom. [0]: https://www.upworthy.com/gen-z-technology-schools-ex1-2/ https://www.upworthy.com/gen-z-technology-schools-ex1-2/
    - beej71 5d ago
      I absolutely agree with you. Unfortunately, those decisions are above my pay grade. But here's hoping the moms can drive the point home!
- pastel8739 6d ago
  This doesn’t really seem obvious to me at all. It seems to me that skills overall are being devalued, and so then will be teachers (even more than they already are). Why do you think this?

kalcode 6d ago

What I do for work, isn't the same as what I do for fun. I think others need to embrace that too. Your work can be fun, and can be a joy. But that shouldn't be folks only outlet for themselves to measure. At one point in my career I was ONLY reviewing and guiding off-shore contractors. It felt even worse than LLMs. But I did enjoy it though, but going to LLMs didn't drastically change my workflow. LLMs feel like leading a bunch of juniors with no real stake or business context. So for me it didn't fundamentally change things, it just meant I could steer the progress before a PR is created later in the week that misses the mark completely. There were plenty of other issues in the software development business that sucks the soul of creating out. So I think you asking the right questions. Cause I felt like I've asked myself those questions even before LLMs.

hgoel 6d ago

I don't get it, you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do. As if you'd be happy to just write anything as long as you were allowed to manually type everything out. On top of that there's the "did you enjoy the craft or did you enjoy the compliments" framing. Are people who use pre-existing libraries just fishing for compliments too? No, of course not, they're making a cost-benefit analysis and deciding that certain tasks are better off delegated rather than repeated by hand. Same goes for choosing when to use AI. Not everything in every project justifies full human effort, regardless of how much those humans enjoy their craft. Many of the other replies have referenced the arts, but I think a better example would be research. Scientists have constantly been in a position where improvements in technology shift the nature of their work without being able to change what they fundamentally do. They might enjoy the art of manually calibrating an instrument to extreme precision, but ultimately their craft is to do research. If the auto-calibration is going to be sufficient for their experiment's needs, there's no reason to waste time doing a manual calibration. Yet, not requiring extreme precision does not mean the experiment's results have no scientific value, nor does it reflect on their dedication towards their craft.

beej71 6d ago
> you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do Can't speak for the OP but I definite care what my code is supposed to do. :) The last little program I wrote was a 40-line thing to compute my estimated quarterly taxes so I wouldn't have to launch a spreadsheet. It had better work right! I could have used an LLM to write it, but that would have been boring as hell. Got no compliments for it. No one has even seen it. I don't care; it was just relaxing and fun to code.
bigstrat2003 6d ago
> I don't get it, you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do. As if you'd be happy to just write anything as long as you were allowed to manually type everything out. Yes. I enjoy programming, and I don't care at all about the end result (unless it's something immoral which I wouldn't wish to be a part of). I don't think that should be so surprising to you.

argentinian 6d ago

If programming was used to temporarily increase one's self esteem from it then it's not a problem with the IAs, but a psychological problem. The problem is valuing a human being because of what they produce and not recognizing intrinsic value. The same situation could have happened in a different profession when automation replaced it, it's not about IA.

DidntUseIt 6d ago

Yep, calculator, etc. A lot of random abstract comments like this about AI. Share anecdotes and examples if you have any

watwut 6d ago

Of course most creators actually enjoy craft, do enjoy compliments and find them motivating ... and need money and want money. There is no special introspection requires, unless you are signing up for "all people are one-dimensional simpletons" theory of mind. Which ia simply incorrect theory of mind, useful only when one wants to score cheap rhetorical win.

crawfordcomeaux 6d ago

We all have intrinsic value being threatened by these systems and technologists (particularly systems/software engineers and programmers) have a responsibility to build systems to help humans meet their everyday needs without or with minimal oppression (only as a stepping stone to full removal/prevention). Chasing the feelings is a distraction game everyone is doing using their preferred fields/hobbies. Now is the time to gather and reorganize because the oppressors are for sure doing it.

acedTrex 6d ago

> I remain convinced that handcrafted will always beat AI generated crafts. The IKEA vs the carpenter analogy fails because a carpenter has to create each piece of furniture from scratch I appreciate this statement, it really hammers home some of the differences ive been feeling from the analogy. You put it in words better.

1dom 6d ago

> PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply. I appreciated this, but I feel the crux of the issue is this is only true with painful caveats. If you're a "computer carpenter" (massive nerd), that massive nerdiness was almost like a scarce asset in the professional world that appeared only after a life involving thousands of solitary hours from a young age in front of a computer screen. That asset has been somewhat synthesized now. The asset of being able to quickly understand and produce a solution appropriate for a large technical system is now _significantly_ less scarce for businesses. Sure, we still have our intrinsic value, but that's going to get increasingly less fun to convert into the sort of value necessary to pay bills.

dasil003 6d ago
I think the nerdiness is still a huge asset, because what I've seen is that technical people are the ones whos ceiling is raised the most by AI. Sure, anyone can make a flashy demo now, and so the signaling value of being able to create something like that is gone, not to mention flashy demos themselves have lost 90% of the wow factor overnight and will continue to plummet. But in a way these superficial perception shifts that don't actually impact the fundamental value of technical expertise as much as it seems. Yes, it does affect your ability to pull a high paycheck purely from nuts and bolts code slinging—I would argue that was an especially privileged moat over the last 20 years powered by the rise of FAANG. Programmers before that era did not make anywhere near the salaries of the 2010s, and other more serious engineering disciplines never have and never will make that kind of money. So sure, pour one out for the salad days, but also it helps to have some perspective. But why I think software engineers will be fine is this: most people simply do not have the patience, discipline, or frankly interest in thinking deeply about how anything should work. If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product. The amount of software is only increasing, and being able to intuitively understand what computers and systems (including human processes!) can actually do, and distinguish from the magical thinking will only increase in value. The job will change for sure, but when the dust settles I believe the outcome is many more software engineers will have replaced their product managers than vice versa.

hirvi74 6d ago

Regarding programming, I would say my answer would be yes to all of your questions. I think all of those feelings and pleasures can exist simultaneously. Though, I believe you are touching on a point that is common in Buddhism. Attachment leads to suffering. Many of us, myself included, are attached to the identity of being a programmer. I would by lying if I said I did not have bittersweet feelings about the future. But I try to always remind myself about the impermanence of everything in the universe. Even if LLMs never existed, there would be a day when I write my final line of code. The day may come sooner than I once imagined, but it was always destined. I think it is important to be mindful of the present as well. I can still program currently. I was programming minutes before righting this comment. Thus, it is imperative that I spend some time relishing in the fact that I still am healthy and capable enough to program. I have not been replaced yet. I still feel an abundance of gratitude and satisfaction.

MachineMan 6d ago
Great comment. Was it really ever ours or do we merely give back what Prometheus stole from the Gods?

chorizo 6d ago

Honestly, enjoying the craft hasn’t resulted in a career related to it. My real job and chores take up most of my capacity, leaving little to enjoy the craft. But now with AI, I can play with crafting as if it was a video game. The end results, which nowhere near is satisfying, is better than nothing. Coding with AI feels gamified and simulated, but still somehow creates useful outcomes.

e584 6d ago

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qarl 6d ago

As a creator - I am delighted that I can now create at about 20X the rate of what I could before. Maybe more. I have produced more cool shit in the last 6 months than I have in the preceding 10 years. It's an amazing time to be alive.

abustamam 6d ago

I'm building an app to help me manage my Toastmasters clubs. I'm using AI to do it because I honestly dont care how it's made, I'm the only user right now. I just want it to work. Thus far AI has allowed me to generate power points for meetings, pdf generation for agendas, smart role assignments, CMS for reaching out to guests to join, speech tracking, and a lot of other neat stuff. Could I have done it without AI? Probably, but again its a hobby. It would have taken me a lot more time and effort to design and figure this out. Someone else could have built something like this (with or without AI), and indeed many similar products exist, but theyre either paid solutions or just dont work the way I want it to. I showed this to a few other Toastmasters and they would want to use it for their own clubs. The way i see it, software is just a means to an end. I have over a decade of Toastmasters experience and have been involved in many clubs so I think my intrinsic knowledge and experience IS my value, not the software. If anything, AI helped me unleash more of my value to Toastmasters as a provider of a tool, rather than as my career as a software engineer.

0x69420 6d ago

not that it was necessarily the intent, but you laid on the "PS: you have intrinsic value" with the exact same tone and cadence as someone trying to work in a "you are loved/valued" while trying to talk someone off the tenth-floor railing. jesus, it's really bleak out there, huh.