alt Hacker NewsI disagree. It very much looks like AI. In fact, this is close to something a good model will few- or even one-shot.
I don’t like to say it. I am not proud of it but I like to be rational. We are outgunned and we are not going to make it by ignoring the obvious.
The world did indeed change. My passion projects of before 2024 look like quaint relics from a distant past and they in fact are. Most of them will be one-shotted by quantized open models running locally in 20mins whereas I took weeks.
Doing things “by hand” is as much a waste of time or perhaps even more so than coding your apps in handcrafted assembly. It’s beautiful and I did it and perhaps someday, when retired probably, will do it again if at all possible but it makes absolutely zero sense to do it if you take your time seriously and are not madly in love with code itself which I suspect most are not because.. why would you. Code is not the product. The product is the product.
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There are commits from before 2020 even and the project clearly marks "pre-ai" development too. If you look for it on the web you find the first postings about it in 2020 already too.
My friend and I were in the car the other day and I remarked on the same thing.
Historically engineers and artists were two different kinds of people, often making fun of each other, especially the former of the latter because of the "starving artist" meme.
But what I've realised since is that engineers are now realising that we were artists all along.
And now there's a division in our ranks, those who use tools to get the job done and those who enjoy the process of writing all their code by hand, aka their art.
I can appreciate both, but I'm not going to pretend that I'd waste time in a business environment doing the latter when I should be doing the former. My friend only wants to do the latter and said he'd change careers if it gets too bad.
> The product is the product.
What is the product made of? Code. If it's dogshit code, it's a dogshit product. So too with every "one-shot" 3D game Codex might spit out for you. It can make something that appears impressive the first time you look at it, but that nobody would ever play for more than 5 minutes because the facade falls over the moment it comes into contact with reality.
Doing things by hand is part of the learning process. Sure, you can prompt an AI to one-shot a 3D open world game, but you'll learn nothing about programming, computer graphics, or game design. That domain knowledge makes you more effective with the AI tools when you choose to use them. What you're saying might apply to experienced engineers, but not a high school kid learning the craft for the first time.
And yes, there will be people who have no interest in learning and just want to manage the AI to do everything for them. I remain skeptical that (manager + AI) will beat (domain expert + AI). It's possible that the relevant kinds of expertise will evolve, but I'm betting on some form of expertise remaining relevant for a long time.