> you have a passion for building things that solve problems
The AI hypers are more about “building things” than “solving problems”. When you analyze their comments and projects, they can barely articulate what the project’s purpose is about. Or even if it can be used by somebody else. It’s always about LoC, coding speed, and specs complexity.
You're talking about a very niche group out of all the devs using AI, which is the majority of developers.
I know what you mean, there's definitely a contingent of people super hyped up about AI who seem to be using it to build stuff to build more stuff to build more stuff, and I don't know what actual problem they're trying to solve at the end of the day. But I'm not sure that doesn't mean there's value, like someone building carpentry tools and not actually building anything with them, but building them for others to use?
Regardless, in my case, I build a SaaS app that I sell to real non-technical small businesses in a tiny niche that helps them with a particular problem they face in their business. They don't care that it uses AI, they just need this problem solved at an affordable price so they can focus on other things. This solution that I sell would have been absolutely impossible to provide in an automated way pre-LLM, and I could never have built and grown this business on my own (in this time frame anyway, probably at all) without agentic development.
I always wonder what is the ratio of these projects that do "solve problems" and that appear to "solve problem" and that do not "solve problems"...
Most of times people would say the do solve them. Still I might or might not be right that quite often they do not in reality.