alt Hacker News> 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.
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I personally went through the authors dilemma but came out different. I personally don’t care for the writing by hand, but absolutely do read every line produced by AI, because I take pride it a well designed and easy to understand system; well designed abstractions. I’m able to build better and easier to understand software (with better tests!) then I ever was before.
AI is a great editor; I can finally do all the refactors that I wanted to do that were much harder before; would have taken a long time.
AI is great at writing tooling, I love a good tool that gets the task at hand done; encodes a task that others will need to do. Couple that with a skill file and now a fuzzy tech debt migration can actually be completed across many teams at there pace.
I focus on the cheapest model/fastest model (been using Luna). I use pi and don’t try to multiplex my time, and stay in flow on a specific task till it is done. And I’m very happy with this, actually enjoy this more. Vim skills stay useful for editing the prompts/module structure/fixing slop code during review/ and review.
The volume of code is high so reading a diff is suboptimal for review; so I tend to review from local checkout using vim (LSP tooling important during review, go to def, etc).
I see your point but I'm not sure there is much more to say on the matter: apart from having fun, learning stuff and taking pride in your work, what other reasons do you see for "doing things the hard way"? You could argue that it makes you more competitive because you'll be better at babysitting a coding agent, but this feels less and less true with every new model. Unless you're seeing something else to take into account here?