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Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?

Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?

4 pointsby rizsyed138 comments

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  • No. I am going to launch a startup next week by pivoting my current personal application into a different industry.

    Some highlights:

    * a proxy (and reverse proxy) is 3 words on a web server configuration object that supports many such proxies on many such web servers

    * it can send 6,000,000 web socket messages per second per socket (or 5,000,000 per second roundtrip with responses)

    * it can log everything

    * none of it was written with AI. The one time I used AI to validate some absurd performance results the AI took a lot of education to follow the code only to reaffirm my incorrect conclusion

    by austin-cheney
  • So, After 1 year of computational ph.d., I really pushed a lot the AI models. But honesty, also if they can be really good, I think that it does not really speedup a lot in long term a junior. You cannot really present non-validated results, and the validation of the huge amount of unorganized things that they generate is really stressing. So yes, for a while I was losing motivation, because I felt like I had to produce more but I could really follow that productivity.

    To really get motivation, u need to spend the correct amount of time of understand and make your hand dirty when it is necessary. I noticed that if I try before by myself, I understand what I am doing, and after I just optimize the code using an LMM, it is way more motivating

    by sorbalda
  • Personally, no. The existence of genAI has zero impact on that for me. It's simple to ignore it entirely.
    by JohnFen
  • Opposite, AI has let me delve into resources that were hard to find, compare and confirm approaches to problems, and make progress on dozens more projects that I'd had sitting around.

    I now have Home Assistant established at home. LibreElec for a home media server. Time lapse camera for home mushroom growing. Wine steeping projects. And much more.

    by Festro
  • It's more or less the same for me. I do dread the impact of AI on certain fields -- e.g. let's say you want to contribute to an OSS by reading the source code, GitHub issues, and making patches, but now people swarm the repo with AI so all those low hanging fruits are gone. This of course should NOT impact your decision to continue your work, but it probably does impact your morale.

    For me, I'm more interested in learning the internals of systems (How do locks work, and why do we need them? How does VFS work?) and making experimental implementations in learning OSes (for sure I don't have the technical skills to implement the ideas in production OSes). AI helps by being a very good search engine, but other than that it doesn't help much, as I completely block code generation from an AI agent. Everything is discussion only.

    by ferguess_k
  • Absolutely not.

    I have way more hard problems that engage me then ever.

    I do both human and AI coding. The former more to learn and mold my mind around a problem. The latter when I feel I am ready to delegate to a junior dev.

    I think of AI coding like how I’ve operated as a principal engineer at a company. It works well when you study the problem well enough to know precisely what you want. That often requires actual hands on technical work IMO. The coding isn’t for the machine, its not even to ship, it’s to help me think. Then I have a basis to really understand and care about the details. I can micromanage agents to do what’s expected at this point.

    by softwaredoug
  • I'm tinkering much more because I have an easy way to enter into a new domain and apply what I know to that domain. I can also get unstuck a bit more quickly as I go deeper. Before it was reading textbooks, this turned into searching the web, now I have a minion who can go write me a summary. Is the minion perfect? No, but more often it is.
    by jtap
  • People will go "no, I nerd out and tinker more than ever" where by "nerd out and tinker", and what they mean is "I prompt the AI, and it does the tinkering for me".

    I say the question isn't if you use AI to build you something, but if you nerd out and tinker yourself.

    by coldtea

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