I had fun playing around in Claude getting it to write 6502 assembler for the BBC Micro. It is fun to imagine what we could have built on those old machines with these new coding agents! But it is kind of hollow isn't it.
It's the difference between building a table yourself and telling someone else to build a table for you.
If you've never done anything for yourself, usually with your own hands, you don't understand the pleasure and satisfaction that comes from doing it.
And since "AI" isn't human, it can't know that feeling, either.
That’s an absurd thing to say.
Doesn’t matter what “AI” feels or doesn’t feel. AI is a tool. You can derive as much pleasure from having an ideia, planning it, working on it from a higher level, and seeing it come to life as you do when you get down and dirty with it and do it from the low level up.
Let’s talk like adults here. Please.
There’s space for both and there’s a need for both.
It's not absurd if you've actually done these things. I can only conclude from your response that you have not, so you don't know what it's like, therefore you don't know what the rest of us talking about.
Well, given that you are selfishly and arrogantly trying to set universal boundaries on what constitutes labour and effort, and what qualifies as “work” based on your feelings alone, then it seems fairly on brand for you to go about assuming things about people you don’t know from atom.
So you do you.
Go have fun bringing other people’s work down so you can feel better about yourself.
There are plenty of people enjoying designing, for example people who 3D print objects they design, or people designing PCBs or even entire gadgets but outsourcing production.
With LLMs, I guess a factor is how much direction you give the machine. “Build me a graphical desktop” likely isn’t very enjoyable, but I can see co-working with a LLM being enjoyable. Examples
- think of some novel UI interaction, and let the LLM code it
- spending hours to speed up the GUI or to make it use less memory
Knowing your limitations of building, but being good at designing and watching somebody/something else realise your vision is incredibly satisfying.
I see it like 3D printing. Nobody can extrude molten plastic out of their bodies to make things, but the skill of designing the construction well and then watch the machine execute it is certainly a good feeling. I dont really see how this is different to designing some software verbally and prompting an ai to build it for you.
Everything in tech is about standing in the shoulders of what came before.
While it's totally respectable to treat your code as your personal zen garden, I like the idea of having a highway where I can make reality anything that comes from my imagination, and also having time for family, friends, work and exercising out of sedentarism.