I think that is one of my problems with AI. People who were once creators, and who were the only means to produce it (either you became a creator by learning the skills or hired a creator to do it) did things. Now that a machine can do it they babysit it at best. If they enjoyed the process of creation, something was lost. I would hate washing clothes by hand and am glad I have a washing machine to do it for me. But if I enjoyed it I am sure I’d have to use the washing machine at a laundromat job because it is more efficient, while lamenting the lost enjoyment from handwashing myself and instead becoming a glorified babysitter. And in my personal life I might not even have the time to wash clothes by hand if I liked it and would keep washing with the machine. Much easier to make time for something if that is the only way it can get done; much easier to have time to handwash clothes when that is the only way you can have clean clothes without buying new.
I admit I now work a non-tech career. And my motivation to do my own hobby projects went way down because “well if AI can do it since it’s greenfield,” but I also do not want to use AI, so nothing gets done. Small hobby project so I could learn would be still building something new only I could do (or that I’d have to hire out). Now if something else can do it I feel like I am handicapping myself so I can learn (even though I have never even used AI to code), which feels very different. Like having to learn math without calculators while knowing they are a possibility, vs. learning math without when calculators are not invented yet so you cannot have that complaint. Yes, I know, abacuses, but I hope you get my point. Going from the project being something only I or someone else with the skills could have done, so it makes sense for me to do it, it was efficient, to “well I have to to learn the skills but it would have been faster to just get AI to do it.” (If that is even true! Maybe I am getting overly influenced by bots pushing AI and it would be faster for ME to do it.) That makes it feel way less motivating to try myself.
And that does not even get into whether AI can even do it. So many comments (that may or may not be bots, not sure) nowadays in dev communities seeming to change their tune from “AI slows me down. It’s faster to do it yourself correctly, making mistakes that are easier to catch, than to use the hallucinator that makes mistakes that look correct so it’s harder to find those mistakes in the first place” to “actually you have to use it, it’s just a tool, and it is getting better every day, get on board or get left behind, maybe it sucks at brownfield projects in industry but it can whip up your hobby project or quick web UI much faster than you can.” Not sure if this is actual people changing opinions as they have more time with the tech and it improves (and is it? Because there are both reports of it getting better, and reports of new models being worse).
“Go try the tools to assess them and form your own opinion then!” I’m fresh out of a CS degree and don’t feel knowledgeable enough in coding to be able to assess if it would be flawed or not. I trust expert opinions (or at least more experienced opinions, which I assume to be most users of programming.dev) over my own, which usually helps but is awful when the experts conflict. As for just learning to code well so I become qualified to judge for myself, I’m still hearing conflicting things! “It’ll speed up your learning x5, it helped me with this thing that otherwise would have taken hours of forumscrolling and trial and error” vs. “it makes so many mistakes, especially when you are learning and do not yet know how to catch the AI mistakes, you shouldn’t use it.” I personally do not feel great about trusting something that (as far as I know) is not actually citing its sources, that does not know and is not speaking from experience. I hate the idea of trusting a black box where I cannot look at the insides and see how it came to that output or ask an expert who knows more than me about what the insides are doing (because yeah, I admit cars are black boxes to me because I do not understand their working, but I know someone does!). I hate the idea of trusting something made to be nondeterministic by design to be correct all the time, or having to be its babysitter-corrected-reviewer instead of just making it myself. But maybe it advanced further than I thought?
End result: too many conflicting ideas, paralysis, do nothing. (And even if AI does actually make you faster, doing it without AI is still infinitely faster than doing nothing.) God I hope typing that conclusion helps motivate me to get back on those projects, building my skills I have not been using at work back up.
I don’t know what to think anymore. Do not want to fight a losing battle and be a stupid Luddite, also recognizing Luddites were not exactly “all tech bad” but “who is the tech doing things for and who is it doing it to,” wanting to get ahead and not have things done to me without also promoting use of a tool that does things to others. Not wanting to get automated out of a job, “you’re so smart andioop, you are sure to get a good job!” only to see knowledge workers threatened while being autistic so the social skills are not so hot (I can work on improving! But I feel I’ll probably never approach the level of a non-autistic person applying the same effort, nor will I ever get some nonverbal cues) and not liking the idea of manual labor… also recognizing that people who can change things do not care about the people getting automated out of a job so I have to figure out how to reskill while having a full-time job, into something that will not just be automated away too (but everything I am good at is stuff people claim AI can do). Thinking about how disruptors, even of men-in-the-middle, not only can take out fat cats but also little guys like me who learned how to do that kind of job, so maybe being forced to do something else for society is good, but also that families and lives depend on a job and the unregulated surveillance capitalism society I live in does not always have us doing meaningful work that contributes to something useful for society so maybe the disruption does not actually force us to pick something more useful to society now.
Still don’t like AI, but also scared of being wrong and getting eaten because of my own bias and not being willing to move on and change with the times at the old age of my 20s. Also not even sure how to change with the times.
I’m lucky enough to sometimes take public transit that publicly posts its data on arrival times and the like. Have been working on a script to tell me when there’s a track change (which changes where I need to wait for the train) because I’m a lazy person who wants to just have a notification fly across my phone screen instead of actually checking on the website. Currently working on testing some functionality before dumping it on my Raspberry Pi. I usually work on this while on the transit, but hopefully I’ll do some of it this weekend.
Also would like to get working on the bog-standard baby coder personal project habit tracker, to make sure I remember how to do front end, back end, etc. I’ve learned I am more likely to use a system I built for myself. We will see if I get to it!