Many people who enjoyed building and coding things are going through this right now, myself included.
In my case, I felt that I was pretty good at rapid product prototyping and had made that part of my identity. Then AI agents made it trivial. It took me some time to process and accept that reality. But I’m okay with it now. I simply had to move on.
After a while, I found two things that have helped:
1. Leaning into other areas where AI can boost my skills rather than just replace them, such as writing (for example, my last two posts made it to the front page of HN) and sales (leads, proposals, etc)
2. Taking on more ambitious projects. I used to think about side projects I could complete in days, and now I think more about projects I can complete in months. With AI, days have become hours and months have become days, so I simply try to think of projects that would have taken me a long time before.
I personally used to enjoy the challenge of it. I enjoyed the craftmanship. I am so glad I got to enjoy the challenge of implementing IETF specs and the debugging interop etc... it's so sad to me now that people just bruteforce all this with agents.
I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?
I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools.
I think the more apt comparison would be a carpenter to a mass produced factory. If you've read any of Yegge's recent ramblings than factories of factories seem to be what the AI focused peeps like to produce.
Here is another thing I find frustrating, but I don't know the right way to express it. A lot of this AI tooling/coding seems self-indulgent? 'I built a better software factory!'. The tools are very powerful, but I don't see the results yet. The frustration outweighs results.
I am underwater dealing with it. I am getting outlandish PRs against Pion. So I spend my time triaging and feel burned out. The 'AI future' I was expecting would be people swooping in and clearing up the backlog in high quality ways.
Instead I get people trying to add new APIs when it can already be done with existing APIs and then arguing about it with me.
Please don't forget you are under no obligation to triage all the awful things.
You are well within your rights to require submitters reach a certain standard before you will review their request.
Your time is finite and precious. Your project benefits from your enthusiasm and knowledge. It does not benefit from you acting as human reviewer of a tsunami of low quality content.
You are allowed to be ruthlessly protective of your time to the benefit of your project.
This begs an importent question: how? How do you filter without putting up barriers that high quality contributors will not want to climb?
I ask both as a maintainer who has been overwhelmed and as someone who declines to participate in communities where the bar is set too high for casual drive-by contributions.
Because the factories of factories is mostly bullshit. OpenAI blogged about how it was complicated for them to build a project using AI alone and the specs in the repo, how easy it was for models to get lost, not do what was expected of them and the burden it was on the team.
I don't think we will never get there but we're definitely not there yet. Models still require a lot of handholding to get things done.
> I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools.
I suspect there's some survivorship bias at play here. You don't hear what the tradesmen who shied away from using powertools thought because they ceased to find work as tradesmen.
In the same way, future software makers will all be raving about their favorite LLM.
A better analogy for an individual might be a cnc lathe. You can make anything you want perfectly but if you enjoyed wood turning then you may not get the same satisfaction from the process of running a cnc.
I think there’s still value in hand made furniture with little to no power tool involvement. There’s certainly value in creating furniture yourself in this way.
It doesn’t give answer the question about the people who loved that job , the many old school carpenters who had to adapt or give up.
I wonder if hand coding will become mostly a hobby and maybe a niche market. I’m not saying I like it, that’s tbd, but I wonder about it.
Programming was the thing that clicked for me most out of anything I've done in my life. That's not to say I was an exceptional programmer, probably a bit above average among professionals but not by much. However for some reason I am absolutely having the time of my life using AI tools to build all kinds of fun and useful (to me) things.
I do sometimes miss programming by hand; the flow state, the satisfaction upon completion, the sense of ownership and identity. But it feels similar to how I look back on doing math in college... a fun thing I was pursuing at the time. An academic and pure thing that I may return to as a hobby someday.
There might be a lot going on, depending on what kind of programming tasks you use AI for, but here's one hunch: I think the current AI usage pattern disrupts our core sense-making mechanism on the code we create. It jumps from nothing to a full implementation too quickly and there's no gradual learning curve (impedance match) gently pulling us along, which makes the coding process highly disorienting.
Because I'm guessing your passion was for the craft and not just the result.
Before there were factories, if you wanted a chair you needed an artisan to make one for you. When factories pumped out chairs, there was no need for the artisan to make chairs. But building factories that made chairs was a craft in itself. If you wanted a factory to make chairs, you needed an artisan to set one up for you. A craft became redundant, but enabled another to exist.
It's natural to mourn a craft that becomes redundant. But such an event is not unique.
I do think there is something different about AI, though, in that it attacks the craft of cognition itself. At some point there's no room for a human artisan to build on top. The required faculties become too great for any human mind.
> there is something different about AI, though, in that it attacks the craft of cognition itself.
It's particularly frustrating that it's simultaneously superhuman and incredibly unreliable when it comes to cognition.
E.g. it can whip out 100,000 lines of code in the time you'd write 500...but 5% of that code will be janky, or subtly buggy, etc.
It's the "oh...you're absolutely right!" effect. I can't think of any other tools that are so powerful yet so finnicky and almost guaranteed to fail in ways that are so difficult to detect.
Yes, although the folks that said "this is the worst it will ever be" have some evidence in their court. The best models now are much better than the best models a year ago.
Some big gnarly problems remain (e.g. continual learning), but I think the fact of AI existing and being better than humans at cognition no longer seems like something out in the far future.
> The best models now are much better than the best models a year ago.
I went back to using Opus 4.8. I don't feel like the newest models are all that much better. The tooling around them has gotten better, and i guess mythos et al are good at hacking or whatever, but the models don't seem any better at not making mistakes than 6-8 months ago
1. It’s natural to lose interest in things. I used to be into pop music. Lost interest. I used to game a lot. Lost interest. I used to be into various TV shows, lost interest
2. Not special any more.
I’m not sure this is true but I used to enjoy writing a blog. This was 1998-2005. Once everyone started posting via FB and Twitter it felt to me no longer like I was doing something special. That might be egotistical but whatever. I felt like I didn’t have as much to say
Similarly I made games for decades. Then Unity and Unreal made it trivial. New games are posted hourly on itch.io and 1000 other sites. I no longer felt special making a game
If anything I think AI might contribute here. It used to feel special to code. Now, anyone can do it. Yes they are not perfect. But I’ve met non coders making really impressive apps. and, it will only get better at it.
That said, LLMs have made me pick up and complete 6 projects in the last 6 months. They removed the tedium and frustration of dealing with bad docs, version breaks, etc and let me build the things I wanted to build without getting stuck in the weeds
all of this is the long way of saying, whatever issue you’re having with motivation it’s got nothing to do with AI. It’s something else and you’re just using AI as an excuse because it’s the new thing
First, anhedonia is a real psychological crisis. You might want to speak to a professional.
Second, the old saying "it's the journey not the destination" is apt here. If you didn't enjoy the process in the first place then even if AI never came around something would have knocked the wind out of your sails. If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing. Either learn to love the process or begin the journey of searching for some other thing to fill the void left behind.
> If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing
I can still hike to the top of mountains even though helicopters exist, but if helicopter tourism is as popular as it seems to be becoming, and Bluetooth speakers are as available as they are, the journey and result is going to feel very different, if it's not entirely ruined.
Isn't that the actual endgame, what we're doing? All tasks done, all software written, everything automated, housing and food for everyone, humanity free to enjoy whatever?
So yeah, enjoy whatever makes you happy. Take a break, find a hobby, travel somewhere. Or do nothing, that also works.
It's in the act of solving greed and cruelty right now, but it's gonna magnify both for a little while before it's finally solved forever. There won't be any humans left alive when it's done, but that's the price we must pay for "Peace on Earth".
Your brain, your values. Only you can know why you ascribe less value to things that AI readily produces, but it is fundamentally a choice you get to make.
In the beforetimes, a lot of people didn't value software, but many software developers still did.
You don't have to jump through hoops of your own making to justify the things you want to enjoy and, outside of the workplace, people won't value you as an individual based on any set of performance criteria.
Choose between 1. You don't love what you're working on or 2. You don't enjoy working with AI. IMO those are the two primary problems, and both solvable in their own way (more or less).
When using AI you're not the one doing the work, thus you don't feel the same satisfaction as crafting something yourself, nor does it incite any passion.
I had the same feeling at some point, until I went back to coding by hand just to exercise my skills, and I have to say after a while it felt so much better and I was hooked on working my little side project. Using AI doesn't scratch the same itch for me.
Interestingly enough, I went the other way round. AI made results readily available, but there was a combination of needing to fine-tune the process + adding corrections which I found a lot better than tinkering with code. I was never a craftsman, but I had interests in areas adjacent and not-so-adjacent, so AI freeing up my time made me able to link other things together.
Try to increase the complexity of the work you're doing. It's not that AIs don't makes mistakes but they are able to pattern match to larger and larger pieces of the problem as more people use it and more iterations of the model are released. So your challenge is now in steering it in a way that these errors are minimised while reducing bloat.
Try to think of yourself as a professor who's trying to come up with a problem statement worth solving. The AI is your "lab" that will help you run experiments.
It's not crazy to feel this way. When the barrier to entry drops dramatically very quickly, it's natural to re-evaluate all your priorities. I personally flip between apathy and excitement.
User expectations are also going to grow. If you're already a dev, you're already ahead if you keep up. It's always been the case that someone could release a free package that makes your personal proprietary software suddenly hard to justify.
I don't think anyone is worried about user expectations. It's management expectations. The output expectation goes up, while the quality of that output goes down, but is still your responsibility.
I'm not surprised professional software developers are not enjoying AI development.
Roughly speaking, you might have taken a task that was in the control, flow, or relaxation zone, closer to the center there, and lowered the difficulty so much that now it's flat out in the middle of the boredom zone.
My answer to this is to either seek out much harder problems (moving it back up into challenge, for example), or to change to a task where I have lower skill and so am in the learning mode rather than the execution mode, which I find much more pleasant and compelling than boring.
You change the goalpost, basically, or give yourself a handicap, to bootstrap yourself back up into motivating regions of the graph. Just a model, but I think it's one that is really useful.
how are we supposed to answer that? we don't know anything about you lol. you gotta give me more info, like, results for what? when you're coding? what are you working on? is it driven by yourself or is it for your job? help me help you.
I don’t think it's the same at all. Nobody is interested in watching computers play against each other, so he still can do what he loves. He didn't suddenly have to work with/through machines now.
Why not Goliath when he lost to David's new-fangled technology?
Wikipedia[1] says Deep Blue had 30x 120Mhz CPUs and 480 custom VLSI chess chips, and could do 11 GFLOPS. HN[2] says that's roughly an iPhone 5s.
Wikipedia[2] says 11 GFLOPS of compute power cost about half a billion inflation-adjusted dollars in the mid 1980s when the Deep Blue project was started; cost about half a million in 1996 when it was playing Kasparov; costs about 12 cents today. (Of course it's daft to compare custom chess chips and CPUs and GPUs, supercomputers and mobile SoCs, but it'll do).
Same tbh. I lost my motivation to do any work aside from my job for a while. Now I'm working on some stuff for my friends, heavy using AI and it's just...meh. Whatever feeling of craftsmanship and skill I had is gone, now it's mostly mechanical. And if this is the case, I feel like I might as well go do something more interesting / lucrative / beneficial to society.
In my case, I felt that I was pretty good at rapid product prototyping and had made that part of my identity. Then AI agents made it trivial. It took me some time to process and accept that reality. But I’m okay with it now. I simply had to move on.
After a while, I found two things that have helped:
1. Leaning into other areas where AI can boost my skills rather than just replace them, such as writing (for example, my last two posts made it to the front page of HN) and sales (leads, proposals, etc)
2. Taking on more ambitious projects. I used to think about side projects I could complete in days, and now I think more about projects I can complete in months. With AI, days have become hours and months have become days, so I simply try to think of projects that would have taken me a long time before.
I wonder how carpenters felt when powertools started taking off?
I think the more apt comparison would be a carpenter to a mass produced factory. If you've read any of Yegge's recent ramblings than factories of factories seem to be what the AI focused peeps like to produce.
I am underwater dealing with it. I am getting outlandish PRs against Pion. So I spend my time triaging and feel burned out. The 'AI future' I was expecting would be people swooping in and clearing up the backlog in high quality ways.
Instead I get people trying to add new APIs when it can already be done with existing APIs and then arguing about it with me.
You are well within your rights to require submitters reach a certain standard before you will review their request.
Your time is finite and precious. Your project benefits from your enthusiasm and knowledge. It does not benefit from you acting as human reviewer of a tsunami of low quality content.
You are allowed to be ruthlessly protective of your time to the benefit of your project.
I ask both as a maintainer who has been overwhelmed and as someone who declines to participate in communities where the bar is set too high for casual drive-by contributions.
I don't think we will never get there but we're definitely not there yet. Models still require a lot of handholding to get things done.
I suspect there's some survivorship bias at play here. You don't hear what the tradesmen who shied away from using powertools thought because they ceased to find work as tradesmen.
In the same way, future software makers will all be raving about their favorite LLM.
AI feels like something else entirely. You're not even doing the writing or the thinking, you're telling someone else to do it and they "do" it.
It's more like a carpenter walking into a factory and saying to someone I want to build xyz and it builds it immediately.
I wonder if hand coding will become mostly a hobby and maybe a niche market. I’m not saying I like it, that’s tbd, but I wonder about it.
I do sometimes miss programming by hand; the flow state, the satisfaction upon completion, the sense of ownership and identity. But it feels similar to how I look back on doing math in college... a fun thing I was pursuing at the time. An academic and pure thing that I may return to as a hobby someday.
https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...
Before there were factories, if you wanted a chair you needed an artisan to make one for you. When factories pumped out chairs, there was no need for the artisan to make chairs. But building factories that made chairs was a craft in itself. If you wanted a factory to make chairs, you needed an artisan to set one up for you. A craft became redundant, but enabled another to exist.
It's natural to mourn a craft that becomes redundant. But such an event is not unique.
I do think there is something different about AI, though, in that it attacks the craft of cognition itself. At some point there's no room for a human artisan to build on top. The required faculties become too great for any human mind.
It's particularly frustrating that it's simultaneously superhuman and incredibly unreliable when it comes to cognition.
E.g. it can whip out 100,000 lines of code in the time you'd write 500...but 5% of that code will be janky, or subtly buggy, etc.
It's the "oh...you're absolutely right!" effect. I can't think of any other tools that are so powerful yet so finnicky and almost guaranteed to fail in ways that are so difficult to detect.
Some big gnarly problems remain (e.g. continual learning), but I think the fact of AI existing and being better than humans at cognition no longer seems like something out in the far future.
I went back to using Opus 4.8. I don't feel like the newest models are all that much better. The tooling around them has gotten better, and i guess mythos et al are good at hacking or whatever, but the models don't seem any better at not making mistakes than 6-8 months ago
My thoughts:
1. It’s natural to lose interest in things. I used to be into pop music. Lost interest. I used to game a lot. Lost interest. I used to be into various TV shows, lost interest
2. Not special any more. I’m not sure this is true but I used to enjoy writing a blog. This was 1998-2005. Once everyone started posting via FB and Twitter it felt to me no longer like I was doing something special. That might be egotistical but whatever. I felt like I didn’t have as much to say
Similarly I made games for decades. Then Unity and Unreal made it trivial. New games are posted hourly on itch.io and 1000 other sites. I no longer felt special making a game
If anything I think AI might contribute here. It used to feel special to code. Now, anyone can do it. Yes they are not perfect. But I’ve met non coders making really impressive apps. and, it will only get better at it.
That said, LLMs have made me pick up and complete 6 projects in the last 6 months. They removed the tedium and frustration of dealing with bad docs, version breaks, etc and let me build the things I wanted to build without getting stuck in the weeds
all of this is the long way of saying, whatever issue you’re having with motivation it’s got nothing to do with AI. It’s something else and you’re just using AI as an excuse because it’s the new thing
Second, the old saying "it's the journey not the destination" is apt here. If you didn't enjoy the process in the first place then even if AI never came around something would have knocked the wind out of your sails. If you love the process what do you care that AI can do it faster? You can still do the thing. Either learn to love the process or begin the journey of searching for some other thing to fill the void left behind.
I can still hike to the top of mountains even though helicopters exist, but if helicopter tourism is as popular as it seems to be becoming, and Bluetooth speakers are as available as they are, the journey and result is going to feel very different, if it's not entirely ruined.
So yeah, enjoy whatever makes you happy. Take a break, find a hobby, travel somewhere. Or do nothing, that also works.
This obviously won't happen, because we could do it now, could have done it already, long before AI.
Let me know when AI solves greed and cruelty.
It's in the act of solving greed and cruelty right now, but it's gonna magnify both for a little while before it's finally solved forever. There won't be any humans left alive when it's done, but that's the price we must pay for "Peace on Earth".
In the beforetimes, a lot of people didn't value software, but many software developers still did.
You don't have to jump through hoops of your own making to justify the things you want to enjoy and, outside of the workplace, people won't value you as an individual based on any set of performance criteria.
Cut that out and you're just managing an email inbox.
I had the same feeling at some point, until I went back to coding by hand just to exercise my skills, and I have to say after a while it felt so much better and I was hooked on working my little side project. Using AI doesn't scratch the same itch for me.
I actually enjoy work more now.
Try to think of yourself as a professor who's trying to come up with a problem statement worth solving. The AI is your "lab" that will help you run experiments.
User expectations are also going to grow. If you're already a dev, you're already ahead if you keep up. It's always been the case that someone could release a free package that makes your personal proprietary software suddenly hard to justify.
I'm not surprised professional software developers are not enjoying AI development.
AI does not create world shattering products.
You haven’t made any big hits either (with or without AI).
What’s changed?
Use AI all you want, that isn’t going to bring your passion to life. It’s no different than using an IDE or React or GitHub.
The world is still starving for novel experiences and solutions to annoying problems and clunky workflows.
AI hasn’t changed that. It hasn’t delivered anything either. For that you need the lonely mind of a man
The model I think makes sense here is the Csikszentmihalyi Flow model, by another name the challenge-skill model of effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Characterist...
Roughly speaking, you might have taken a task that was in the control, flow, or relaxation zone, closer to the center there, and lowered the difficulty so much that now it's flat out in the middle of the boredom zone.
My answer to this is to either seek out much harder problems (moving it back up into challenge, for example), or to change to a task where I have lower skill and so am in the learning mode rather than the execution mode, which I find much more pleasant and compelling than boring.
You change the goalpost, basically, or give yourself a handicap, to bootstrap yourself back up into motivating regions of the graph. Just a model, but I think it's one that is really useful.
When I was little, I was surprised to find that using a Game Genie made a lot of Nintendo games instantly become boring.
We are all Lee Sedol.
Wikipedia[1] says Deep Blue had 30x 120Mhz CPUs and 480 custom VLSI chess chips, and could do 11 GFLOPS. HN[2] says that's roughly an iPhone 5s.
Wikipedia[2] says 11 GFLOPS of compute power cost about half a billion inflation-adjusted dollars in the mid 1980s when the Deep Blue project was started; cost about half a million in 1996 when it was playing Kasparov; costs about 12 cents today. (Of course it's daft to compare custom chess chips and CPUs and GPUs, supercomputers and mobile SoCs, but it'll do).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_(chess_computer)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9626731
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_operations_per_...
Hypothetically if Google starts hiring paint dry watchers I’d do it for 200k a year
You stopped creating value and started extracting it. You stopped thinking about how to best serve humanity and started thinking about how to use AI