[CosmicShadow]

The exciting thing about AI is it let's you go back to any project or idea you've ever had and they are now possibly doable, even if they seemed impossible or too much work back then. Some of the key pieces missing have become trivial, and even if you don't know how to do something AI will help you figure it out or just let you come up with a solution that may seem dirty, but actually works, whereas before it was impossible without expert systems and grinding out so much code. It's opened so many doors. It's hard to remember ideas that you have written off before, there are so many blind spots that are now opportunities.

[wruza]

It doesn’t do that for things rarely done before though. And it’s poisoned with opinions from the internet. E.g. you can convince it that we have to remove bullshit layers from programming and make it straightforward. It will even print a few pages of vague bullet points about it, if not yet. But when you ask it to code, it will dump a react form.

I’m not trying to invalidate experiences itt, cause I have a similar one. But it feels futile as we are stuck with our pre-AI bloated and convoluted ways of doing things^W^W making lots of money and securing jobs by writing crap nobody understands why, and there’s no way to undo this or to teach AI to generalize.

I think this novelty is just blindness to how bad things are in the areas you know little about. For example, you may think it solves the job when you ask it to create a button and a route. And it does. But the job wasn’t to create a route, load and validate data and render it on screen in a few pages and files. The job was to take a query and to have it on screen in a couple of lines. Yes it helps writing pages of our nonsense, but it’s still nonsense. It works, but feels like we have fooled ourselves twice now. It also feels like people will soon create AI playbooks for structuring and layering their output, cause ability to code review it will deteriorate in just a few years with less seniors and much more barely-coders who get into it now.

[vacuity]

I want to expand on your sentiment about our pre-AI mindset. Programming has made it easy to do things of essentially no value, while getting lots of money for it. Programming is additive and creative; we can always go further in modelling the world and creating chunks of it to use. But I don't see the value in the newest CRUD fullstack application or website. I don't see the intellectual stimulation or even a reasonable amount of user benefit. Programming allows us to produce a lot, but we should be scrutinizing what that lot is. "AI" that enhances what we've been doing will just continue this dull industry. Greed and a nebulous sense of progress are the primary drivers, but they're empty behind it all. Isn't progress supposed to be about good change? We should be focusing on passion projects and/or genuinely helping, or better yet elevating, users (that is to say, everyone).

[jboggan]

> And it’s poisoned with opinions from the internet.

This is the scary part. What current AI's are very effectively doing is surfacing the best solution (from a pre-existing blog/SO answer) that I might have been able to Google 10 years ago when search was "better" and there was less SEO slop on the internet - and pre-extract the relevant code for me (which is no minor thing).

But I repeatedly have been in situations where I ask for a feature and it brings in a new library and a bunch of extra code and only 2 weeks later as I get more familiar with that library do I realize that the "extra" code I didn't understand at first is part of a Hello World blog post on that framework and I suddenly understand that I have enabled interfaces and features on my business app that were meant for a toy example.