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Comment by sejje | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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.

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