alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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I have coded big projects manually for a long time. Being able to get ai to do it, then step back and marvel at knowing how much work that would have taken manually is very satisfying.
You can say the same for building computers. You didn't actually "built" a computer from the ground up. You just bought the pre-made hardware and plugged it in the places that are made to be easily pluggable.
Everything in tech is about standing in the shoulders of what came before.
> 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.
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.
Designing a table and letting somebody else build it can be enjoyable, too.
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