alt Hacker NewsFuck it, make it anyway
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There are generally two major reasons why programmers don't like what's happening. One is about jobs and money, the other is about craft, meaning, enjoyment. Somewhere in the middle is social status and perceived value of intelligence.
I wonder what's the ratio of these 2 on Hacker News and similar spaces, many posts and comments seem kind of vague about this.
For me, it's mainly about jobs and money. If I was retired or in a safe job, I would watch all of this with excitement. Don't get me wrong, I can fully empathize with the other stuff. I love thinking, creating and inventing stuff that is high quality technically and UX-wise and makes people's lives better.
But at the end of the day, job and money is easily at the top of the "Maslow's hierarchy". I can easily have a similarly happy life without programming or without building products (I don't enjoy programming at work anyway).
If no money pressure, I would code everyday without thinking if my work could be paid.
Sounds like what artisans faced when suggested they better operate those machines that produce more widgets, faster, cheaper.
Game engine. Well, the hard part is making a game that people want to play...
Long before generative AI we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution. YC marched to the drum. Execution! Execution! Execution! Do things that don’t scale, do the hard things, build something people want.
And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!
We are years into generative AI and still there is no fundamental change. The most successful businesses are still the businesses doing something well, not businesses doing things easy. Spending hundreds of hours writing every line of code by hand isn’t a competitive weakness, it isn’t foolish, if it creates a good product.
So, I agree, fuck it, type your code line by line. Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100, they care if your product is good, just as they did in 2025, 2020, 2015…
Maybe you’ll get beaten by someone generating a million lines of code. Just as maybe you would have been beaten by someone who typed faster than you in 2020. Nobody worried about increasing WPM in 2020.
I related a lot to the feelings in this article but over the past year I've come to a different conclusion than the author. In the end of the article he says that there are 3 paths available to him, but I believe there is an additional path to consider.
You can use the AI tools but still program by hand every day for practice and fun. Programming becomes deliberate practice to keep your skills and mind sharp. Like going to the gym, but for your brain. You can use the LLMs to push and challenge yourself, setting more aggressive and ambitious goals than you might have in the old days for learning.
I used to think of software dev like climbing a mountain. Hard, and I loved it. I loved it because of the difficulty. That was the most fun part. Getting to the top, the summit. That was incidental to me. I wouldn't even defend that as a good thing. Certainly not good engineering. It was just what I liked. Any good engineering was incidental to how fun the hard parts of the puzzle were.
Then LLMs came along and I thought "this is like a helicopter. You can go straight up to the top in a few minutes." While very practical, it also led to the feelings the author described. After months of handwringing and using the tools, having existential crises - I've arrived at a new conclusion:
It's not a helicopter. It's a jetpack. And it's still hard to use if you push it to it's absolute limit. Knowing just the right spot to grab the rock as you fly by. Taking as much risk as possible, but not too much. Pushing both the jet pack (or perhaps it's an iron man suit now with latest models) and the rock climbing knowledge as far as they will go. Screwing up, falling off the wall, and learning.
And with this jetpack you can get to places you never could have climbed to without it. Not just the top. Weird, interesting spots on the mountain.
That perspective, which I've taken to over the last month or two has helped me find the fun again. The existential crises have ended and I'm back to feeling about software dev the way I felt a few years ago. Boundless joy and excitement. Probably more now.
The reason for this is, I guess, all too familiar for anyone in a creative field: surprise, it’s generative AI. The ongoing devaluation of the work of artists and makers, chewed up and regurgitated back to us like a mother feeding a baby bird with a subscription model. I have some hope for my friends in other artistic fields; AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with.
Traditional art is still valued. Good AI art takes time and effort and taste and usually some amount of traditional skills. And even some bad AI art is actually a good idea that needs a few talented friends to make happen traditionally - but no one would ever see the vision without the terrible AI rough draft. There is room for all of it, and I'm sick of having to skulk around in the shadows with the things I've made for fear of tripping some Shrill Cancel Protocol.
And if you're worried about your traditional art job, organize; the people who want to replace you with AI will replace you with cheap outsourced labor instead, if you let them. AI isn't the problem.
> AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with
It is one thing to have compassion for artists as their livelihoods become threatened, but this sort of rhetoric makes me think the writer is too blinded by their emotions to have an accurate opinion of the current state of image gen. Much of what can be produced by eg. the openai's image 2.5 model is more-or-less indistinguishable from a person's work.
Is there a Hacker News where there's submissions and talk about AI but it's just sort of like 7 guys in Chelsea boots while one of them doing Romanian dead lifts and squats off in the corner; the audio edition of The Origins of the Second World War has been playing on a consistent loop for the past week and they burn myrrh resin?
Finest Buggywhip Maker in the Land Whinges About Those New-Fangled Automobubbles, Take #7642
It's over. AI is here, and it's so vastly better than any tooling we've produced before, that you have to be really stupidly stubborn not to use it if you're doing real work. And if you object to say that it's not vastly superior, then, you know, "tell me you haven't used a frontier model without telling me you haven't used a frontier model". If you want to get together with your friends and hold a code 'n' sip on Wednesday evenings, maybe fire up an old copy of Vim or Visual Studio and write a game or a little webapp like they used to do in ye olden times just to see what it is like, fine, go nuts. But that's not how software meant for people to actually use gets written anymore.
This resonates. Problem is, as time goes on, even in the hobby coding communities, all the of the tools you use - emulators, toolchain, utilities, code examples - the whole ecosystem will be developed using AI. At that point are you really doing it without AI?
game over bro. adapt and overcome
Coding has always felt a little like sorcery to me, with a lot of learning and experience you can channel data flowing through silicon and networks into something beautiful and useful. It still feels like that, but now you don't need someone like me.
The tradeoff is that it is now easier to do more complex sorcery, even as someone who is writing the code. My motivation has always been the sheer joy of solving each puzzle and moving on to the next. That joy is no less real in the world of LLMs, and having one in the backseat to check my code and answer questions has genuinely expanded the horizon.
I still have my own "fuck it, make it anyway" moments as the premium on my skill disintegrates. I don't think we want a world where humans are no longer involved in controlling that power, and the puzzles are still fun.
This resonated with me incredibly heavily. I will say one thing, i've adopted LLM tools fairly heavily for various things. But im doing so on my terms and strictly using them in a way that to me enhances my rigorous understanding of a given system.
Its not QUITE the same thing but its a close enough approximation that i can enjoy the fruits of the output as if it were my own. Just my own 2cents on my personal struggle
I think the middle way is best here: use AI so you understand how best to apply it to your work but don't deprive yourself of the joy of doing stuff by hand. And if you so desire: just write by hand.
Very unlikely to apply to any job moving forward (i.e., they've equated AI with a competitive advantage, even if the results are not technically competitive), but a job isn't you and you are not a job. And if you're like me, where building stuff is your business, I highly recommend using your skills to build something that makes money (without freaking out about how the thing is built) and then use that to pay for your life and work on code however you'd like in the off hours.
Frustrating? Absofuckinglutely. But you can either spin out or keep progressing, however slowly. My wife and I have been talking about a growing renaissance movement as people where we live (normal, everyday people) go in on other locals for using AI for stuff. Just saw one on Reddit the other day where a local venue got chewed out for using AI for their event flyer.
That doesn't mean AI goes away or everyone "wakes up," but it does mean that it's not this universally loved thing. I personally think that will be the shape of the future too: some places in the world will be all-in while others will opt-out. If you truly want to be a pure craftsman, it's worth looking for where those places and people are and consider relocating. Environment has a huge impact on your ability to think well and clearly; don't underestimate proximity to AI making it seem more threatening than it actually is (and don't just dismiss that as delusion or wishful thinking).
Also don't forget: the economics of AI are unhealthy and this first wave of AI will likely be washed out, followed by a "plateau of productivity" for a few survivors (think how the internet looked from ~2002-2009). Again, just my opinion but I don't think the overall outlook is terrible if you don't allow yourself to be disconnected from your craft and find others who feel the same.
Taking your advice to heart -- fuck it, I'll make my software and art with generative AI assistence despite any possible backlash :)
It's also ironic how the "every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years" sentence applies to author of the article as well. The ego, luddism, and fear of change is real.
I don’t code for work anymore so LLMs have given me ability to “make” things I never would. But it’s so unfulfilling. I get the app way faster but all I want is the end result; the process of talking to the LLM sucks. It’s such a shitty feeling I don’t really know how to explain it, it’s like all the worst parts of trying to collaborate with someone and none of the joy from success.
There is legit grief associated with what AI is doing to our craft, and we're all trying to grapple with it in our own ways
Off topic but is there anything like Hacker News but without AI posts?
"I am making shoes with a hammer and some leather but this Nike shop just opened next to me and got me nervous, let's see what the future holds for me, I'll keep hammering nails to this sole as pure artisans do..."
AI didn’t take initiative, circumspection, effort and thoughtfulness away. At the end of the day, those are the qualities you can rely on. Pats on the head from others come and go.
> Through chatting to Shad I came to realise there are only really three paths open to me. I can start using generative AI to feel like I’m “keeping up” or “competing”, but then I won’t enjoy the work. I could stop making things entirely, but as any creative person will know that’s never really an option. Or, I can keep making things the way I enjoy, keep learning, keep doing it the hard way, for no real concrete reason other than I want to do it. That’s why we make games. That’s why we make anything.
So, a very long blurb to simply say that you can avoid using genAI and just do things "the hard way". And why? Just because he wants to do it.
Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
This is interesting because where he says "I take no pleasure in the results", I'm split. Sometimes I make something of no lasting value and feel no pleasure. Sometimes I use my context and creativity to ask for a result, and when the model one-shots it, I take a lot of pleasure in getting the result I want and need in that moment.
Since creating AI is/was the last challenge in computer science, it makes sense that it would be the most disruptive to the people and systems behind it.
I imagine that many of us went into CS fields after growing up inspired by RD-D2 and C-3PO, Data, J.A.R.V.I.S., too many synthetic beings to list. Now there's a sense that it's all ending, that whatever reason(s) we went into tech have been rendered almost irrelevant overnight. That for the first time in our lives, there truly may be no path forward that's anything like what we trained for. Despite that, I want to leave some breadcrumbs of hope here anyway.
How many of us were nerds in high school? Then geeks when it became cool to be one from roughly 1995 to 2015? Then pariahs when tech bros captured everything we were working towards for personal profit, rushing us headlong into dystopia?
Somehow we went from armies of one to veterans of a spiritual war we didn't even know we were fighting, which in hindsight we were losing.
As a systems-level problem, we aren't going to solve this on our own. That's why so many of us are having an identity crisis.
I would propose that if we're facing the loss of opportunity as a society, then that cost must be borne by the people most able to bear it.
What does that mean? Well, lets do a root cause analysis. It's interesting that in a time of rising unemployment and underemployment, prices seem to only go up. Very interesting. Why is that?
Let's examine initial and steady-state conditions. Barter, trade and commerce kept us fed for centuries when we had a social contract and exchanged money for products and services in good faith. What does the plot look like on the long tail when the majority of people can't find work worth being compensated for, when AI can do everything faster/better/cheaper than humans, yet prices have not come down? How will people buy what they need to survive?
There seems to be a paradox with two schools of thought vying for the future: Alpha) we always find ways to innovate and enterprise will continue or Beta) automated innovation means that enterprise may end or fundamentally change.
Since HN mainly focuses on school Alpha, lets look at Beta. As the alternative narrative, understanding it requires questioning our assumptions. What is personal responsibility? What is heroism? What are we working towards? Those sorts of things.
I know in my life, I've had to continually level up after countless setbacks and failures. In one sense that's good: it forces us to become better people. But in another sense it's bad: we wake up one day to see that despite our best efforts, we aren't moving forward, only laterally. Without a win, that's about the time that midlife crisis hits, where in a very real sense it makes sense to exit the rat race. To hand things off to the next generation. To transition into being an elder, a teacher or even a hermit. That's where I find myself now.
Yet some people seem to have done well with shortcuts. Rather than leveling up, they went around problems, passing the burden of solving them onto others. Spiritual growth ended when money arrived. At which point profit-seeking became their priority to hide that fact, leaving affordability far behind. Those are the people who feel entitled to tell others what to do because they have more money. They're the ones whose reality can't accept school Beta, so they work to eradicate it. The ones who don't get consent before moving forward with their plans.
I can't answer what meaningful goal led each of us into tech. But I can propose a starting definition of progress across science, philosophy and religion: ensuring that no child starves or dies.
We've arrived at a crossroads where despite having tremendous power at our fingertips, we seem to have missed the forest for the trees.
If enterprise is taken from our reach by wealthy and powerful people who embrace apathy over empathy, then our power is in our connection with each other. Maybe we don't have to take the power back. Maybe through direct action and joining in meaningful work with others, we find that we already have the power, and that it has always been ours. That the conditions of our torment aren't fundamental, but a construct contrived by people so used to being in power that clinging to it is all they have. That the systems of control we live under are simply an illusion, and that by realizing that, we've already taken the first step in shrugging them off.
Making or doing something that helps others without regard for personal gain may be the most disruptive thing we can do.
I have pondered whether our career/hobby will eventually be like equestrian activities. Horses or walking were basically the only options for land traversal for thousands of years. Now, horseback riding is nothing more than a hobby or sport. I grew up on a horse farm and rode a lot in my youth. I can't say the skill has ever truly been useful, but it was fun for a time.
No matter how good AI gets, I believe I will always program by hand to some degree. I really enjoy the activity, and most of all, I have enjoyed the learning and composition aspect. Programming by hand might not be useful, but like most hobbies, that does not really matter at the end of the day.
In other words…
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades.
in art you don't know what you're making. you are creating, you aren't just moving towards a goal. that's the power of it and that's why it feels so good. now an llm might assist in that, but you got to be there with your hands on it, deeply. there is no other way.
I've noticed that delivery drivers are always racing around like their lives depend on it? Why do they do that? Because they are given workloads that are impossible to complete without racing. But what if it just didn't race? Their employers would be forced to hire more drivers, or increase the cost of delivery. By racing they are just building a rod for their own backs.
I feel like it's the same with programming now. So you built something in a week that used to take two. Ok, that's expected now. Expectations are raised before you can even blink, but it's very difficult to lower them. So that's it. We've built the rod for our backs and now must shit out code quicker than we can think.
I'm sad I won't get to take pride in anything I program any more. But oh well. There are other things in life that are more important. I expect I'll become more of a plumber just joining together slop to make things happen.
> surprise, it’s generative AI. The ongoing devaluation of the work of artists and makers
Who themselves can use AI to make even more radical art with far less effort, but refuse to do so because of some kind of... I don't know, a mental block? Perhaps we need better AI-accelerated artist tooling instead of one-shot garbage.
> Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years
Meanwhile, I feel more enabled than in my entire 35+ year career programming. But I also never got pushed into it, and don't have to deal with coworkers who use it badly because I'm solo currently. I do feel bad for people on teams for whom AI has caused much consternation.
> peer pressure is very real
Caving into peer pressure as a coder? Not something I have ever done, unfortunately. If you want to entirely reject AI assistance, then just own it and don't whine about it.
> even disregarding all the environmental
The environmental arguments are non-evidence-backed nonsense. Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that this whole idea comes from Chinese bot influence campaigns trying to politically polarize AI in the United States in order to slow us down so that they can surge ahead and economically win. And unfortunately, it's working. Case in point.
> It isn’t fun for me
I STILL don't understand this POV. Prior to AI, I had a massive backlog of ideas that I simply did not have the time or energy to work on. I now can, and have now built out a lot of those ideas (see my github). I'm chewing through that backlog like a chainsaw. Is all of the produced code perfect? No. Do I insist on lots more tests and controls to ensure it is as close to that as controls can get it? Yes. Has it yet to produce unfixable bugs? No.
> I use my interactive git branch switcher every single day
I love making those little tools too! And now I can make 10 of them in the time it used to take me to make 1 of them myself! Your tool is a neat idea! You still own that idea! And I can also rewrite it in Rust or Zig now with AI since I hate Go, and I don't think that's a bad thing!
> I’ve spent years learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that might have been a waste of time
Your understanding and experience is not going away. In fact, it's needed to steer your AI accelerator.
> It also happens to be developed entirely without generative AI
That is a conscious choice made flying in the face of the evidence that it could have been built a lot faster with AI assistance and YOUR guidance. What's wrong with delivery speed, again?
> there are only really three paths open to me
This is a fallacy. Let's call it the false trichotomy fallacy. You have already resigned yourself to be unhappy about this since none of your options include "joy", so your brain automatically gathers evidence to support that belief... and you need to realize this, because it is dangerous. You now literally won't be able to perceive evidence TO ACTUALLY be happy about it- I call this "epistemic blindness", or we could just call it "doom framing". The key thing to understand is that you control the framing by choosing it, and that your chosen framings automatically and artificially limit your perceived options.
I can prove this to you- Think back to the first time you encountered AI work assistance. Was your feeling good, or bad? Has it ever switched? I'm going to guess that it started early and never switched. Why is that? Because you (or your brain, via its confirmation-bias-seeking) immediately decided to remember evidence supporting your initial feeling, and forget or ignore evidence against it!
But yes. If you must completely ignore AI to keep your sanity based on your own self-limited set of possible options (none of which result in happiness), then please, just go ahead and do so and just own it. Just don't whine about it, because that attitude (victimization via false self-perceived lack of agency and putting all blame on externalities) is toxic.
I like the codegen = power tools analogy to writing software.
I didn't go to school for CS or adjacent: I went to art school 20 years ago for 'new media' which feels like a _silly_ thing to have on a diploma in 2026.
My career started in high school and ran this way: print design w/ computer geekery on the side -> classes in all sorts of digital media production methods -> web design -> web development -> full-stack development w/ a UI/UX focus -> engineering manager ? -> engineering director ??
Then Claude comes crashing in a couple years ago and suddenly code I would grid on to get right got easier and easier to ship. I have enough _experience_ to know not to trust it, put in the appropriate guardrails, and now we can deliver work at a velocity that makes more people happy and keeps my team grounded in a reliable 40hr workweek.
Back to power tools: I'm done going to READMEs and docs and learning the order of operations to build with a hammer and nails. Turns out I didn't really _love coding_. The Job To Be Done was to build the app/feature in a way that satisfies business and user requirements, can be reliably maintained over time, and is securely integrated with existing systems. The tools are now fully-automatic instead of semi-automated with IDEs and linters. Turns out I just like delivering product that solves business objectives (working on turning that into a bigger thing).
I'm still functionally the Responsible Party that gets in trouble if things break down, and its been a couple years of codegen entering our repos and things haven't broken down.
I'm using the lightness of mind the above now provides to find space for the things that strike me creatively, like I did when I was younger and more into art and music. I'd rather spend that creative juice elsewhere, not coding.
So I'm sorry to the coders who love the craft and feel like the industry is slipping from them. Like many industries that have started as craft, code has officially entered its mechanization phase. It requires less finish carpenters who know how to work a coping saw and more general contractors with the latest 18v line of tools.
There's a bigger audience of businesses and consumers that want solutions built quickly, reliably, from a trusted party with experience than there is for tailored code.
I don't mean for this to be discouraging. I really like photos OP took in this piece, and that NoAi camera app looks really great! I'm sorry there's no profitable market for it, but I'm glad it exists! I feel like the skills that created that app belong at an Adobe or an Apple working on creative tools where they can afford to hire someone to work on just single feature or idea.
I wish there was more opportunity for everyone to do work that brings them good brain tingles makes you feel the most human you can be. "Fuck it, make it anyway" is exactly the right attitude rn if you can afford to do it.
Hobby stuff- I found slowing down works best. Just enjoy spending time in the evening picking the colors for my little project that will never ship. Genuinely relaxing, had some random boomer sitcom as background noise.
Work - max adhd no brakes cat stand dog stand satellites.
Honestly loving software engineering right now. The age of magic incantations and magic meat is over. I’m the wizard now. We all are.
And it’s awesome.
> AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with.
I don't like AI, but AI generated images have use cases. For instance, if you program a browser game but you lack human artists. Then AI generated images can be useful. Many of these images suck and feel misplaced, but some are quite nice, so I don't think it applies to all of AI generated content.
My take: AI doesn't replace art, and it doesn't replace the good parts of programming.
An art analogy:
Imagine that the AI doesn't paint the painting, and it certainly doesn't decide what to paint. Instead it washes the brushes, stretches the canvas, mixes the paints, and cleans your studio.
If you try to make it do the actual art, what you'll get -- the "slop" people talk about -- is a mathematical average of all art, or a skewed average if you try to prompt it out of that central attractor. That's why visual AI art looks "plastic" and weird and falls into a kind of uncanny valley.
The reason I love AI in coding is: with painting the stuff I listed (washing brushes, stretching canvas, cleaning the studio) is a small part of painting. With coding stuff like CRUD, glue, endless obvious tests, and re-implementation of "embarrassingly solved" algorithms ends up by like 90% of all manual coding by time spent.
Coding is like painting if the other stuff around painting took up 90% of the time, leaving only 10% of the time to paint.
For complex projects 10% is generous. In many cases glue and CRUD and CI scripts and detailed bulleted git commit messages and merges and tests and very boring sorts of documentation and and and and and takes up more like 99% of the time, leaving like 1% for actual creativity.
This has been a legitimate complaint of coders forever, especially when one is coding for a job. AI, properly deployed, shrinks the fraction of grunt work dramatically. What's left is the most interesting stuff, architecture, design, planning, and deep implementation work of parts that need that kind of focus.
And that's the actual painting as far as coding is concerned.
The role of AI in both art and coding should be to do the uncreative parts.
Edit:
The only caveat is: I get the idea that the whole thing can be craft. But I think most projects are not like this, and projects done for money are almost by definition not like this. If you want to some code purely for the craft and the art and not use AI that's fine and nobody will stop you.
I expect to see a kind of hand-made software niche or market the way there is for hand-crafted furniture, hand-forged metallurgy, hand-blown glass, and so on.
That will not be a report generator for an internal portal inside an insurance company or a SaaS backend for managing policy on other SaaS backends. That stuff's gonna be vibe coded almost 100%. Good.
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You can still control the output LLMs produce. Obviously you can one-shot "make me a fun game" but I think there's a whole spectrum from pure vibe coding - you literally never look at the code, through controlling the direction and skimming the code all the way to reviewing every single line and manually editing parts.
Also I think the quality of the models has made a big difference to my attitude. Until Astra they were kind of "meh, a junior engineer could do this but I wouldn't be happy with it" but with Astra I feel like it's reached the point where it's competent and it just lacks taste in some ways. It's even done some clever things that I might not have thought of.
Below is an example convo leading to the the title phrase being used on the AI side of things. Programmers and systems engineers need to wake up to our collective responsibility. It is through putting our heads down that's leading to us not collectively organizing to put an end to systems of global domination & oppression. If you aren't willing to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with the power to create life-changing systems, it's time to just quit and go do something else. It's the most responsible path in that face of being unwilling to switch to building for liberation instead of for oppression. Everyone has their reasons, but the main one is a dependence on existing systems and ways of doing things instead of learning to build communities to care for us. I'm in the same boat. Anyway, we all need to collectively step up and realize that the military publicly acknowledges cyber warriors as their greatest asset means that we have a duty to protect the people with the tech we build, instead of continue driving enslavement to it. Check your beliefs...do they serve the standard deaths and need to evolve to center the conditions that sustain life?
"So do we finally resolve the issues of ecocide, genocides, pandemic, and mass systems of oppression?...
Or do we build another advancement of tech foote these hells to capture?
Remember: making the second thing will likely take us way closer to extinction."
"Which makes more money?"
"The first path likely kills money as we know it, so there's no comparison. Making the second one makes more money in the short term, but then extinction."
"Fuck it, make it anyway"
Pretty unusual to see the /r/aiwars slapfights (here presented without touching on any of the obvious rebuttals) make it HN, but I guess it makes sense. I'm sure a sizeable majority of the US population agrees that visual art that involves neural networks at any point is dogmatically Satanic, so that probably includes at least ~40-60% of this crowd, too.
It's also a little disheartening for me to see people crashing out about philosophy of aesthetics at a time when I'm terrified of grey goo and killer drones, but that's more on me than him. I'm not exactly doing much to prevent it either, so staying on the previous societal crisis seems defensible!
On the (well written!) post's particulars:
I can't help but feel like this attitude is... "myopic" is too far, but perhaps... intensive? Namely, it seems to be treating the contemporary craft of game design as some hallowed pursuit that artificial claws are ripping away from us, when in fact I'd argue it's one of the most recent and most rapidly-changing SWE subfields around. Yes, a lot of the skills he learned will be useless. Yes, that is inherently embarassing and anxiety-inducing and enraging, and no, none of us saw this coming (don't believe the scruffies, their fingers were crossed up till ~2018, too!).
But is a world in which video game designers get to make higher quality games faster really such a bad one? I've felt frustrated with the scope and polish of AAA games for years, and the quintessential indie dev story involves way too many years of toil.
Of course that falls apart if you assume that involving neural networks at any point in the process necessarily leads to worse outcomes, but... well, don't? That's clearly just a dogma, so either open it up to actual scientific experimentation or just adopt a different, more reality-amenable dogma. Living life as an anti-AI purist (or Luddite, I say with the utmost respect for King Ludd) puts you in a cognitive place where the soul of humanity is under seige by shadowy, chrome figures, and the only way to get to a healthier place is to examine that assumption.
Like, clearly, software made with Soul and Taste and Intuition and Experience and Consciousness can still be published -- and I'm glad the author and his friend are doing so! The threat is that they might not perform as well in a marketplace ruled by capital, but, I mean... did they ever? Writing your own game engine in C++ was already the equivelant of going to university for Tuba, or striking out as a full-time landscape painter; it was mostly for the children of the rich.
*TL;DR:* Would a radical shakeup of the video game world really be such a disaster? Assuming we aren't just assuming a disaster, that is.
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So, I think one of the more interesting fits for AI is for tech-heads that aren't really proper devs/programmers. So like for example myself I'm just a Linux/sysadmin/devops guy. I can figure some shit out for sure and have glided upon the surface of webdev for a few decades, but I cannot by any means call myself a developer. However, with AI over the last couple of years, I've been able to do a lot of cool shit that I never would have dreamed of, and at the same time I've learnt some things (I won't claim to think that I've learned more than I could/would have if I'd actually put in the study/time/work, but that might be a different conversation). Point is for non-dev tech-heads like myself, I think that might be the sweetest spot for the actual enjoyment of AI? Eg we can perhaps put out some slightly above average AI slop, yeah it's not exactly "ours," but goddam did we have fun and we did some shit that we've always wanted to do, and it came out pretty damn decent, good enough for our usage!
Some things I've done that have been incredibly fun and invigorating and never would have happened if not for AI:
https://afterword.exe.xyz (I wanted badly to play Jonah's original Word After Word (desktop only) game on my phone or just in a web browser and with remote friends/family, so got his blessing for a web remake)
https://github.com/jgbrwn/fetchcade
https://loderunner2099.exe.xyz/
https://v2.my-upc.com (don't ask, if you know, you know)
https://aiconversation.apps.techpique.com
https://github.com/jgbrwn/mst3k-anything (Paste a video URL. Get back a robot-heckled version)
https://hn-readtheroom.exe.xyz/
https://jgbrwn.itch.io/cannonsmash-web
https://history-of-webhosting.exe.xyz/
https://wordizzle.exe.xyz/ (WIP)
https://exe-muttha-fukken-dev.exe.xyz/ (fansite lol)
https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin
https://github.com/jgbrwn/rsync-web
With AI story telling, lot of people can tell their stories. Democratization of story telling. Earlier we just used words, now people can make others imagine the words with AI art. Honestly I want the best story to win. Anybody can be a storyteller.
the old ways are dying, theres so much room for new creativity. exciting