Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I spent most of the last two years making a rather large hobby project. A 3D renderer for cad/visualization. It's pretty hard and slow work because getting anything wrong is usually hard to debug. Get a sign wrong and you have a black image suddenly, with painstaking debugging following. I worked on it for evenings and weekends, probably totaling a man-month of work or so.

As a fun experiment, yesterday I asked a model to create this for me. It almost one shotted it. After a couple of iterations and 30 minutes I had made what I made over two years. The total AI cost (deepseek api, so entirely usage based) was $0.5.

Now, I didn't enjoy making this AI guided version. And I didn't learn anything. But terrifyingly it has removed the drive to make another 2 year project "by hand". The end result (the runnihg demo) was never the goal. But still I can't now make myself hand-craft what an AI can spit out in an hour for $1!

This is what bothers me the most. I'm old and senior enough that I don't fear for my job. But the AI thing just swallowed my hobby.

You knew exactly what you wanted, since you already built it. All decisions were already made, all tradeoffs reached. LLMs are definitely helpful, but try exploring something new with them and you'll slow down significantly.

Its surprising, how this key insight is lacking, even in the best of developers.

It happened fast, as you prompted it just the right way. Another person, who doesn't have all that context in the mind, would fail quickly.

For example I have decades of Software experience, but wont know where to even begin what OP did.

Most of my time these days is learning about domains, not technical skills. I keep programming books around for references, but the books I read most are books that go deep into some domain, either technical like operating systems or network, or soft skills like planning, design and communication.

It’s kinda the old saying about $900/hr expert that only taps with an hammer. The price is not about tapping, it’s about knowing where to tap.

> For example I have decades of Software experience, but wont know where to even begin what OP did.

Simple, you start by asking LLM for more info.

Not to mention the poster understands what the output is, what it's supposed to do, and can judge that it is the thing that they intended to build.

But this has always been a developer's work, it's understanding what is needed, translating it to working software, and judging the result, and doing so at scale, over time, and with other people.

Yes, and that's also why I'm really effective at using AI when the context is one I'm comfortable with. Still - it doesn't feel like I'm actually doing anything. The product was never the goal for me. The craft was. I feel like someone who always loved to be a blacksmith who is now in charge of a production line of 10 CNC mills that produce coat hooks. The fact that I know what makes a good coat hook doesn't really help make it a job I don't really enjoy.

no matter how good AI gets, i think it will never reach human-level in our ability to move goalposts

You shouldn’t be bothered that someone else does your hobby better. It’s a hobby, it’s meant to be for you, for no purpose other than fun, experimentation, entertainment, what have you. The outcome isn’t as important as the process.

That’s my take on this, at least. I’ll never be very good at Scythe, or the most creative role-player, certainly never managed to do anything beautiful in pottery class (although the glazing is pretty).

That’s fine. I achieve enough in other areas ._.

> you shouldn't be bothered that someone else does your hobby better

I don't know, I'd feel this way a little. if it's something that's not obvious how much effort goes into the underlying process, it can feel pretty deflating if the craft behind it has felt like it's eliminated.

I can't really think of a good example, but if my hobby was glueing precision glueing little 3d models, then suddenly the hobby has exploded because 3d printers have made it easy, it suddenly feels like it's devalued my collection of manually crafted plastic models

3D printing nonsense can be its own hobby! Let’s be happy that more people are getting back into hobbies over doom-scrolling all evening.

Aside: I had to get into puzzling to manage stress, my doctor actually ‘prescribed’ it, and hours go by while you mindlessly hunt for sky-blue pieces. There’s no point thinking about people that puzzle faster than you :)

I think we need to enjoy the process of things more. Life is precious. If someone else does your thing harder/faster/better/stronger, what are you gonna do? Doom-scroll? Nah, enjoy your special little thing.

Imagine taking up a hobby of drawing, then bemoaning the existence of a printer. Or learning spanish, and bemoaning google translate. Or trying out woodworking, and bemoaning IKEA.

I don't think painting and photography (Which was when painters perhaps feared for their jobs at first) are equivalent. If I paint, it's not because I want an exact "photo" of a person or scene. The fact that its painted by hand makes it fundamentally different from a photograph. With software, you can't really see that. It's compiled and you just see the end result.

How many of the learnings over the past two years went into the prompt that you gave the model? Is it possible that you wouldn't have been able to prompt it so well without those learnings?

Some, but actually surprisingly little. The thing is that my hobby projects are usually extremely "prior art". It's like "make a renderer (just like one that 1000 people have made before)". It's not novel. I just needed a renderer and none was suitable. But the AI knows exactly what to do with almost no context and almost no decisions.

I've had the same basic experience.

I also don't fear for my job, but it's because I was already laid off 1.5 years ago, right at the start of this AI boom. :/

However, I love coding with the AI. I can get it to handle all the crap that I know what it should look like, but don't want to spend the time doing myself. Instead, I get to focus on making the thing work well and do what I want. I am so much happier coding with it than without it.

Now if I can just find a job to do it in, I'll be set. :/

> And I didn't learn anything.

So first off, I mean, of course you didn't, right? You had already learned most of what you were going to learn from this specific project by doing it by hand.

But yes, if you use AI to do projects that might have been at the edge of your abilities pre-AI, you will learn a lot less. The solution, I've found, is to get more ambitious until you're back to the edge of your abilities even with AI. You should be asking the agent questions like "has anyone tried?" and keep pushing until it isn't sure, and you're not sure you have any idea what you're doing. Then ask questions until you feel like you sort of know what you're doing, and verify your understanding by directing the agent to build.

I oscillate around that sentiment. And am very bruised by 2026 LLM capabilities. But at times there was a small positive effect knowing that the LLM found a path to my problem. Without even looking at it, it gave my brain more certainty that there was indeed a path and that I could then keep walking. And a few times it made me try to see if I could even be as fast by optimizing my thinking ans organisation (foolish I know but still).

Such fuzzy times...

You may be going through the same crisis that chess masters went through decades ago. But chess didn't die because engines were better, in fact there has never been more people interested in chess as today. Cheaters are annoying though.

Which ide/tool/harness did you use?

Copilot CLI with DeepSeek, writing code in mostly C#.

Copilot CLI with DeepSeek, writing code in mostly C#.

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