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  • "Oh I would really like to take a principled stand, but it's just too hard to, I know what I'm doing is wrong and I hope someone takes away my option to do this one day."

    Ugh. Either grow a spine and stick to your purported principles, or grow a spine and stand by your actions. Either way, grow a spine.

  • This is a silly post. No one is forcing this guy to do anything. He did it because he didn't want to take the time to learn to do this all himself or simplify his expectations so that he'd have to learn less. Or he did it because he wanted to and liked the way the website looks and it was easy and he may not actually care too much about the ethics (at least not as much as who ever he's asking forgiveness from).
  • > I've learned a lot about using a tool like this but the biggest result is that development has lost its joy. There were no challenges, there were no puzzles, no hurdles to overcome. The biggest lesson is that software development is now about the destination not the journey, the journey is for the agent.

    Which is why I minimise my use of these tools. I'm not going to delegate the fun/meaningful parts to a machine.

  • >or they can't figure out how to become profitable after all this.

    The AI white pills will argue they already are vastly profitable - although they always, always leave out the small detail of externalities (AI R&D costs and data center-related capex). Of course if you remove the two largest costs, the thing will be profitable.

    My intuition is that ultimately the US federal government sustains the whole thing financially, and profitability questions will be dismissed for as long as it continues to do so

  • I always feel bad and guilty when coding with ai support or with an agent. This is the new way and things can be done that seemed impossible but I always have a bad feeling
  • Your mission is not to build software, it's to share your collection of cool typewriters with the world. And your AI built website helps you do that! It shares your YT channel, and now I know a bit more about typewriters. Thank you for building your site with AI and for building your collection with passion. Do you have a typewriter room somewhere?
  • “I've learned a lot about using a tool like this but the biggest result is that development has lost its joy. There were no challenges, there were no puzzles, no hurdles to overcome. The biggest lesson is that software development is now about the destination not the journey, the journey is for the agent. If that's the case then the joy now has to be thinking about what is possible. I have built features into this site that I never would have on my own.”

    I really appreciate these words. I am not a professional developer, and my code to this point has been limited to VBA and writing excel formulas (if that’s even coding).

    I’ve recently started work on a full-blown Mac App. I’ve had the idea for years, but never the expertise. It’s not something I’d ever pay someone for either, mainly because it would be expensive and I don’t know if there’s a market for it. But I got a Pro subscription, fired up Xcode and got to work. Within minutes I had a proof of concept. Less than a month later, and I’ve got what I consider to be a nearly finished app with more features than I’d ever considered.

    In the interim, I’ve also vibe-coded up two quick single-page web tools to my (and my wife’s) specifications. Things that I could describe, but would have taken me so much time to learn and build that I just wouldn’t have bothered.

  • I have two issues with AI coding. The first is how giant trillion dollar companies are profiting off the accumulated labour of mostly open source developers who mostly offered their work for free. Open source had this pattern too but there was a kind of give and take that is not present here. The other is the atrophying of my own skills. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use it for my side projects since it’s become a requirement in my day job and I don’t want to forget how to code.

    This creates a grey area for things like a personal blog. If you’re not trying to maintain skills, yeah I wish we could avoid supporting these companies, but I can’t be a hypocrite seeing as I have to use them for work, and I use my provided account as a personal tutor to learn cool stuff.

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