I've always felt building something was close to artistry. You create something out of your thoughts, you shape it how you want and you understand how it works to the most minute detail. The amount of times I've shown something seemingly simple to someone and went "but wait this is what is actually happening in the background!" and started explaining something I thought was cool or clever are great memories to me. AI is turning renaissance paintings into mass-market printing. There's no pride, no joy, just productivity. It's precisely those repetitive, annoying tasks that lead you to create a faster alternative, or to think outside the box and find different ways. I just don't get the hype.
This is exactly what bothers me about the present moment. Not that the pride of craftsmanship is everything, but dialing it down to zero with extreme pressure to stay that way is a bit sad.
But we’ve clearly gone through this with other mediums before, perhaps someday people will appreciate hand written code the way we appreciate hand carved wood. Or perhaps we were all wasting time in this weird middle ground in the march of progress. I guess we’ll find out in 5-15 years.
What about the audience which appreciates software that actually works without one billion subtle bugs and devastating security issues, and which also can be built upon and extended?
Not every project one does will be or should be considered art or a source of joy and pride.
The boring CRUD apps that put the “bread on the table” are just that, a means to an end, they will not be your main source of pride or fulfillment. But somewhere in between there will be projects where you can put all your heart in and turn off that LLM.
Think of the countless boring weddings playlists a DJ has to do or the boring “give me the cheapest” single family homes an architect has to design.
Well, that's a good example. Why would you get a DJ when you can say "Siri, play Weddings Classics"? There's no humanity involved, no skills to read the room or cater to audiences. So you get a DJ; what if your DJ thinks his job or your event is boring and generates the same playlist you could have done yourself? You need passion, you need interest, you need to be involved. Otherwise every job becomes tedious, and humanity dies.
One thing that differentiates a (good) DJ from a playlist is that a DJ will react to the crowd. That'll influence song selection, mixing, live looping, and so on.
Which means clearly we need to feed video of the dancefloor to a vision model and output MIDI tokens!
