Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI? | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?

15 pointsrizsyed138 comments

People will go "no, I nerd out and tinker more than ever" where by "nerd out and tinker", and what they mean is "I prompt the AI, and it does the tinkering for me".

I say the question isn't if you use AI to build you something, but if you nerd out and tinker yourself.

I'd further say it's not a TRUE Scottish tinkering unless you're hand writing machine code yourself and feeding it via punch cards.

"I asked somebody else to do this hobby project for me" is not the same as "I tinkered" whether that somebody else is a person or AI.

Same how you're not a musician just because you had Suno create something.

So, no, sticking to the actual meaning of a thing is not true scotsman fallacy.

> Same how you're not a musician just because you had Suno create something.

In this analogy, the person calling themselves a musician would have to be falsely calling themselves a programmer after using AI to code something. The word used here was "tinker" which can be any number of things. One can "tinker" with business ideas, investment theses, hardware designs, economic models, gameplay concepts, baking recipes, brewing formulas, and more.

But what if I use AI to write live demos where you can write machine code, debug it visually in your browser, punch data on virtual punch cards? What if I used AI to generate videos about this, generate the artwork, backgrounds, narration, intro music, etc. I guess I am just a meta-tinkerer :-)

For some tinkerers, the tinkering is writing the code. That's you.

For other tinkerers, the tinkering is accomplishing an objective or building a thing. That's maybe Matthias Wandel.

I used to be like you (when I was a pro coder), and now I'm more like Matthias (I have a homestead and a small business). You're welcome to write the code and enjoy yourself that way. I want to enjoy the thing I've built, with the help of AI. You can say I didn't build it, I don't really care--my ego isn't wrapped up in it.

> For other tinkerers, the tinkering is accomplishing an objective. That's maybe Matthias Wandel.

So if I outsource all the work to some guy on fiverr am I also a tinkerer?

All of the coding work? Or all of the work?

(Depends what you're building, of course)

>For other tinkerers, the tinkering is accomplishing an objective or building a thing

Those are not tinkerers then, as there's no tinkering involved. Or there might be in other parts (e.g. with electronics to hook up and house the code AI wrote for you, if it's something that will run on a Raspberry Pi), but not in the coding part.

The question implies: "do you still enjoy nerding out and tinkering by writing code yourself, now that AI can write it". Else asking if you're demotivated from doing it "because of AI" wouldn't make sense.

So I would say that "I like making stuff by having AI write the code" is still an admission of not nerding out and tinkering (regarding code) anymore.

> Those are not tinkerers, as there's no tinkering involved.

This seems closed minded view of tinkering. There are plenty of ways to tinker aside from just writing code. It could be in driving traffic to a website, selling a product, combining datasets, automating a task, etc.

I personally love economics and have used AI to tinker with combing multiple datasets to create new ways of viewing economic growth at the metro level across variables.

I don't redefine my words because someone else used them poorly in context or something.

Matthias is obviously a tinkerer.

The post didn't say anything about code, maybe you didn't notice that.

This is on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49711544

If the guy didn't write any code, don't you still think he's a tinkerer? I do. Don't you think he's nerding out? I do.

I'm using AI to mess with all kinds of things I didn't do before AI. Like working on 90s Ford trucks.

If you've narrowed the scope of the question, or narrowed the definition of "tinkering" to require writing code, I'm just left scratching my head.

AI is just another tool to nerd out and tinker with. The question was "Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker".

If you're using AI (to wit: another tool) to nerd out and tinker, then you're obviously not losing that motivation.

So my genuine answer to the original question is: No, I nerd out and tinker more than ever.

Right now, I am using AI as a tool to do stuff I otherwise wouldn't do, like reverse engineer a Whoop band for use with Apple Health sans a Whoop subscription.

I'm tinkering much more because I have an easy way to enter into a new domain and apply what I know to that domain. I can also get unstuck a bit more quickly as I go deeper. Before it was reading textbooks, this turned into searching the web, now I have a minion who can go write me a summary. Is the minion perfect? No, but more often it is.

Absolutely not.

I have way more hard problems that engage me then ever.

I do both human and AI coding. The former more to learn and mold my mind around a problem. The latter when I feel I am ready to delegate to a junior dev.

I think of AI coding like how I’ve operated as a principal engineer at a company. It works well when you study the problem well enough to know precisely what you want. That often requires actual hands on technical work IMO. The coding isn’t for the machine, its not even to ship, it’s to help me think. Then I have a basis to really understand and care about the details. I can micromanage agents to do what’s expected at this point.

Using agents to micromanage agents is something I ended up doing.

Part of the fun is solving puzzles where the coding agent gets stuck and me then giving it technical direction. Especially when an agent says that something cannot be done in software (I show them how it actually can be done).

I am in the more motivated than ever camp.

It's more or less the same for me. I do dread the impact of AI on certain fields -- e.g. let's say you want to contribute to an OSS by reading the source code, GitHub issues, and making patches, but now people swarm the repo with AI so all those low hanging fruits are gone. This of course should NOT impact your decision to continue your work, but it probably does impact your morale.

For me, I'm more interested in learning the internals of systems (How do locks work, and why do we need them? How does VFS work?) and making experimental implementations in learning OSes (for sure I don't have the technical skills to implement the ideas in production OSes). AI helps by being a very good search engine, but other than that it doesn't help much, as I completely block code generation from an AI agent. Everything is discussion only.

Opposite, AI has let me delve into resources that were hard to find, compare and confirm approaches to problems, and make progress on dozens more projects that I'd had sitting around.

I now have Home Assistant established at home. LibreElec for a home media server. Time lapse camera for home mushroom growing. Wine steeping projects. And much more.

Personally, no. The existence of genAI has zero impact on that for me. It's simple to ignore it entirely.

this; I don't like it so I simply don't use it.

So, After 1 year of computational ph.d., I really pushed a lot the AI models. But honesty, also if they can be really good, I think that it does not really speedup a lot in long term a junior. You cannot really present non-validated results, and the validation of the huge amount of unorganized things that they generate is really stressing. So yes, for a while I was losing motivation, because I felt like I had to produce more but I could really follow that productivity.

To really get motivation, u need to spend the correct amount of time of understand and make your hand dirty when it is necessary. I noticed that if I try before by myself, I understand what I am doing, and after I just optimize the code using an LMM, it is way more motivating

No. I am going to launch a startup next week by pivoting my current personal application into a different industry.

Some highlights:

* a proxy (and reverse proxy) is 3 words on a web server configuration object that supports many such proxies on many such web servers

* it can send 6,000,000 web socket messages per second per socket (or 5,000,000 per second roundtrip with responses)

* it can log everything

* none of it was written with AI. The one time I used AI to validate some absurd performance results the AI took a lot of education to follow the code only to reaffirm my incorrect conclusion

No, quite the opposite. It helped me get started on some things because it saved time. LLMs have their shortcomings but their ability to act as a search and summarize service is quite good. I'm not using it much for vibe coding, more for information and as an already skeptical person I mentally prune results to get where I want.

Getting really deep into some technical thing becomes way less. Most of it is solved by a prompt.

On the other hand there are new techniques like keeping the agents on track and imagining about which things now became possible.

But the real tinkering: In real life with real physical work.

No. Before AI, I have never wrote any code outside of work because nothing I could do in a reasonable time would be worth the effort.

With AI, if there's software I wish existed, I can make it happen without making it an unpaid second job.

Opposite for me. I'm reading & understanding more because I know most people will depend on it 100% without understanding. That gap feels like leverage.

I've always had more projects than I do time. And it's easy for me to be selective about where I might use an LLM. So no changes here.

The opposite is true for me. I have always wanted to try Godot as a platform and AI is helping me make that happen.

No. Honestly AI drives me to nerd out and tinker even more just to spite the homogenization and dehumanization of it all. If we're entering a world in which doing anything but blindly consuming whatever pablum the machine feeds us is seen as foolish then I guess I'll be a fool.

I feel like I tinker more now since I can get going quicker and iterate faster now

Either I use GenAI when I feel like it, or I don't, so no.

its the opposite, i can build far more and get stuck much less

There are things I’ve made that I wouldn’t have made without AI. But I don’t feel like it’s “nerding out” or “tinkering”. I get the end result, but I don’t learn anything or become more capable in the process. As a result, I get very little satisfaction from it.

you just have to take the software to a higher level of abstraction... software that builds software. its different, but the tinkering is very much there, its just a massive paradigm shift

no way, the time to tinker is now

No. Quite the opposite.

Not really, no. I'm not particularly motivated right now, but that's just more due to depression and burnout that the effects of AI. I don't tend to use AI for many of my own personal projects, but I also don't see it as something that kills my interest in coding anything either.

no, we go along together

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