Then, I've built a keyboard for myself and I'm still using it. I liked the process and started to build them basically for giveaway. My hope was that it will help people who eager to switch to ergonomic keyboards but the bar is too high for them to build, to figure out things etc.. But it turned out that people who get it without this effort they just try, fail, and leave it dusting on the shelf. They lack commitment, nothing fuels their enthusiasm.
I've definitely spent too many sprints where LLMs told me that something would be easy and they could definitely do it, and then... 2 days later I'm still debugging their crap before it dawns on me... WTF am I doing with my time?!
Overall, I've built a memory safe programming language that solves a lot of problems I personally have - predominately in my spare time over 8 months - and I've learned A TON in the process.
I'm close to a release stage, and on top of that - I've built a lot of good tooling for Ruby that I think other people will find helpful once I polish it (especially if anyone plans to vibe code something non-trivial in Ruby).
But... I'm not really sure this is what I actually wanted to do with my time, and I'm constantly questioning how much time I'm sinking into this and why...
Ya'll need to stop with this cope. It's not a good look.
Many of the people who are complaining about AI vibecoding today also didn't blindly copy/paste from StackOverflow in the past.
But I often do think across adjacent abstraction levels, because abstractions are (varying levels of) leaky. Modern compilers are after many decades good enough and modern computers fast enough that it is rare that I need to dig into the assembly (but I happens, compiler explorer is in my bookmark bar in Firefox).
Other abstractions are far leakier, it is far more common that I look in wireshark to debug network issues, the application level view is often not enough.
One of the leakiest abstractions currently is LLMs. Maybe in a decade or three they will be good enough, but they aren't yet, that's for sure. At least for the hard realtime systems level programming I do. For code generation they often make enough mistakes that the time spent after review and fixes comes out in the wash, even for simple tools. Their use for bug finding, RAG and similar is however promising.
Currently the openbsd mailing list for port is currently going through a clang update and one of the main point is looking at all the packages that failed to build. I even took a long look at the usb stack and the audio subsystem of OpenBSD because of an issue I was having with my DAC.
Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?
With SO copy/paste, you still were undertaking the mental exercise (and reward) of thinking through hard problems, researching solutions, and assembling it yourself.
With AI, you literally outsource most or all of that. The way some people "vibe code", they barely are engaged with any of that process, if at all.
I think about it like I do video games: it's a lot of fun to play them, and while it can be interesting to watch someone else play, it's just not the same.
You’re very reasonable response may be “well, why don’t you just do more of what you want to do and less of what you don’t want to do” but that’s not how incentives work.
You could talk about revealed preferences, and how obviously if this person did these things maybe that’s obviously what he wanted to do. And great, feel good about that.
There’s an uncomfortable reality for most of us normies (maybe not popular with the libertarian HN crowd) that an increase in freedom can make it much more difficult to find meaning and purpose. Friction can be good actually.
I do theorize that this is one of the mechanisms by which productivity could be tanked by AI.
Perhaps at a population scale AI inhibits people from finding fulfillment.
But on an anecdotal basis, "just go find something meaningful". For some of us that "hate the AI timeline", we are still finding purpose and fulfillment by applying AI toward our personal missions.
Nothing different from all innovations.
In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".
> He explains that this happens because knowledge work often relies on “pseudo productivity,” where visible busyness is treated as a proxy for real value. Digital tools reinforce this by making people look active: sending more messages, producing more drafts, attending more meetings, and generating more work artifacts. To avoid the trap, he recommends measuring real outcomes, identifying the true bottlenecks in one’s work, and separating deep work from shallow work so that digital tools support meaningful progress instead of consuming attention.
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Like, you are just as well make the argument that if you replace the pseudo-work, you end up with 8 hours of deep work for things that bring you value.
An agent taking notes and summarizing things is of no use. You are supposed to participate to a meeting, otherwise it is just a memo and the meeting doesn't have to take place. The correct solution is just to not attend it if you know you aren't requested to participate and are just here to grow the numbers and make your company waste money.
What a strange perspective. His dismissal of the long list of projects at the top is also odd.
What's wrong with making something cool and functional (if not "useful"), even if just for yourself, without any profit motive or plan to turn it into some huge business?
I spent the last weekend vibing some plugins for Quod Libet -- a custom bookmark/preview function, a click-to-jump lyrics sidebar, thinking about a search-within-lyrics thing now. It all works beautifully, but I have no illusions about it being some kind of moneymaker -- heck, I doubt it's even worth the time beautifying/minimizing the code to get it acceptable to submit to the Github. But it makes me happy and makes using my library more enjoyable. Isn't that enough? Do they go around asking garage tinkerers and hobby crafters what their marketing plan is, too?
YMMV
At the end of your life, if all you've done are little half baked throwaway projects, you might look back and realize one day you never made anything of any particular significance, just thrashed around building stuff people had already done so many times before that some unthinking, unfeeling LLM can spit it out almost verbatim just so you can say "me too".
This applies to more than just AI, it can be about any type of "side project" really, or any context where you have a wealth of so many possible options that focusing on one intensely forces you to deliberately ignore most of them.
An example for me lately is hackernews. I used to jump around wildy, looking at comments not really even reading articles. I felt like I was learning a lot. But lately I've taken another approach. Instead of clicking a bunch of things, I'm actually determining what is the most interesting article of the day, reading it thoroughly and truly thinking about it, and then after pausing for reflection, forming my own thoughts about it. I have found this to be a far more enriching experience than my previous habit. I think a lot of things in life turn out this way.
The only reason to use AI to build is when you don't really care too much about things, you just want something, anything. An image here, some code there, a ridiculous video. Cheap thrills with no soul required.
There is a difference between learning woodworking as a fun hobby that would allow you to make a chair for yourself vs. doing it in hopes of turning it into a profitable business venture that would make an impact on the world.
By the grandparent comment logic, there is no point in doing anything, unless it can somehow lead you to making an outsized impact on the world. Thus essentially declaring most hobby pursuits (that are done mostly just for the sake of fun and learning) as wasteful.
Every time you need to make an update, you need to bring up the old context, or otherwise get the AI up to speed, which especially if you're using one of the frontier models could be a significant financial drain long term.
You don't get the same dopamine hit too, because you're just making boring updates to something which you threw together in 5 minutes with zero effort. The time and financial cost of building all this stuff may have been better spent on one, good, properly architected project.
Maintaining the project manually also assumes you can quickly understand the codebase which has been produced, otherwise you're completely dependent on Anthropic and them maintaining prices which you can afford. Bearing in mind that as you add new features, the cost of getting the LLM to understand the project increases, right? I might have a naive perspective here.
All that being said - sometimes there really are one-off niche things that are just for personal use that you do continue to use long term. Usually the simpler stuff where you can easily grasp the codebase at a quick glance. It's also great for debugging back and forths.
Personally I just run my local setup with a bunch of MCP stuff and the primary way it helps me is to keep me functional and on task. In some ways it's good if the AI can supervise you as opposed to you supervising it - at least from an ADHD perspective.
It's an interesting idea for sure, I like this article and agree with it.
But I’m also one of those people for whom the “fun” was always solving human problems rather than solving computer problems. I can see how if you are in the latter category AI has already sucked out a lot of joy and how rapidly project switching could be the least-unfun option.
So when a blocker or an idea pops up, it's very easy to use that magic-like tool to solve it quickly and then go back to whatever it's you were doing before.
However, if you care about the quality of your output, that won't be a quick detour. It will pile up with the other "quick" tasks you were doing simultaneously and that's how you end up with 5-10 sessions working on totally unrelated projects.
'Waiting for AI to finish' - even if it's only 1 minute segments, is real, especially if we are delegating. (Maybe I'm interrupted right now!)
But this - it's not the fault of the tool that you're not focused on building something useful, long lasting or material.
That's an entirely different question - and I think if you look into most people's 'experiment' folders, that tendency was always there. Just more code now.
That's on us.
I have zero interest in AI note-taking apps. I write notes for myself to process the meaningful outcomes of a meeting. My notes are short, only capture stuff I actually think I will care about in the future, and after I've written them I have a better mental model of the meeting than I did before.
If I gave the task to an AI, no matter how advanced, it would produce much more unfocused content than the focused notes I am used to writing, and I would lose the process of synthesis that helps me absorb the meeting outcomes. More work product, but actually less productivity.
This part reminded me of a recent article and it’s interesting that he brings up ADHD because that’s probably the bigger issue then. Because what I got from the article and the related conversation, specifically the top comment:
> > Sometimes, tools don’t move the needle because there’s no needle to move.
> It reminds me of something my old CS mentor, now elderly, had said about LLMs a few months ago: "it's a force multiplier, but there has to be some force to multiply."
From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254336
The fact that it turned out that “Human Bottlenecks” post was written by the same person who wrote “Notes on Managing ADHD” which I had printed and studied for tips not that long ago made sense.
So, to connect the dots, the fact he made all of those things without them being part of a bigger plan is, I think, the problem. In the framework of the above quote, there’s no needle there, nothing to multiply.
I’ve been trying to think more about whether what I’m doing is going somewhere, or if I can skip it and simplify things.
Some really good points on how these bots are incentivized to reward mindless engagement though and the bit about voice transcription not producing useful writing landed. When the barrier to release drops the quality naturally does too.
I think the next stage of us learning to harness these tools is us building the ability to reach for excellence even when we are not required to. To accustom ourselves to going beyond minimum viable bar for functionality and to reach for qualities or standards beyond that which the AI brings to the table unaided. A new kind of engineering rigor.
I move that this was always true and is now only far more so.
Sure, but also, who cares? The machine code is completely incidental for most purposes.
The author did not build those products. AI did.
And I don't read anything indicated they had fun.
There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.
With generative AI you are just stealing other people's work. You are learning nothing. Anything could have generated the same projects. There was no skill involved, just enough disposable income to pay for tokens.
And yes some people develop some weird psychosis and think that they did the thing and not the AI. Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.
Maybe I'm just projecting. I enjoy making things. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Sounds like you don't.
> There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.
You're speaking second person, when you should really be speaking first person. You enjoy making everything yourself, by hand. That is fine. It's also your personal perspective.
> You are learning nothing.
If you really aren't learning anything, you're doing AI wrong.
> Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.
The delusion here is constructing a strawman out of the worst qualities you can imagine and berating that instead of actually looking at what other people are doing and trying to work out what they're thinking / how they feel. I can guarantee you that virtually nobody thinks they are the only person that can prompt a particular piece of software into existence.
I know this post probably won't land with you, because I'm a little annoyed while I write it (if only because your post comes off emotional and annoyed as well) (and, sorry in advance), but I do encourage you to consider that perhaps there are other worldviews than the clearly embittered and deeply entrenched one you've espoused. And perhaps those other worldviews are more suited to surviving the oncoming storm.
https://www.tyleo.com/blog/the-terminal-star
A lot of good comes out but it can be hard to separate from the parts that just take advantage of your brain.
This what they have been spending their human tokens on: https://killedbygoogle.com/
They are a decreasing quality searching engine who shows ads. It has never been about intelligence, or lack of resources. Its about incentives and execution.
Your AI wont save you, or make you rich or increase your productivity.
buts its a refreshing that there is an initial list of half baked projects, i suppose meant to evoke horror at the untidiness and wasted time. but honestly each of those projects sound cool as hell. not necessarily durable - but who cares. i’d argue there is a skill, one that is different than traditional programming, that the author was building up over that period.
discipline is important. focus is hard. but allowing yourself to play is not a bad thing at all and i dont think building little interesting side projects should be a shameful act.
It’s a way of working that I really despise and if it’s the future of the profession I want nothing to do with it.
In other words, the issue isn’t the AI subscription, it’s the ADHD.
You make this sound like a bad thing. ADHD isn't always about attention deficit, although it is right there in the name. It's more about attention dysregulation. For those of us prone to hyperfocus, working with AI can provide the kinds of stimulation we crave. I can hardly remember a time when I've felt more engaged with my work, more productive, and more badass.
I actually enjoy the collaborative programming process, and was pair programming with folks before the term was coined. At the end of the day I have the satisfaction of browsing the pretty, readable, DRY, maintainable code we end up with after rounds of refactoring and back and forth. I have always employed linters and code formatters, and this is no different, and my standards are still the same. I yell at the clanker about code duplication, hard-coded assumptions, tightly coupled logic, and in the end, while I don't understand the details of every algorithm, I really understand what we've built and the architecture we've designed.
But prior to this I would rabbit hole. I would try desperately to remember some nuance, or I would not be able to move off a point until I got the validation I was looking for.
The worst is when speaking a foreign language and I hit some complex word in my native language that isn't present in my foreign lexicon. My brain just halts. It wants THAT word or phrase, not a 3 minute detour describing a whole concept.
AI has empowered me to move past these unnecessarily difficult speed bumps in my thinking.
Yep, the same here, I'm a long pair programming enjoyer, but I'd like to raise that collaboration is usually meant with a human being in the context of pp, and prompting and agent to execute a task is nothing like that.
> Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it.
So don’t. Nobody’s twisting your arm.
Nobody told the author to sit down and write a bunch of random useless stuff.
This is like blaming your bicycle for enabling you to stop at too many shops that you didn’t mean to go to when you originally meant to ride straight to the grocery store.
I can relate to this greatly I have started dozens of projects since last summer but have been having a hard time turning these into real value. Not even money but just something that people find useful beyond my own learnings.
Why is it wasted? A powerful new tool was invented, and enthusiasts are exploring ways to harness it. They'll come away with the skill to wield this new tool effectively. The programs they're writing are completely secondary.
AI makes single purpose throw away tools easy to create. This is GREAT. I had to migrate an old Windows 2012 file server share to SharePoint. Microsoft's tools don't work on this old OS. Their SharePoint migration tool running on other machines on the local network constantly failed for nebulous reasons. I finally got fed up and spent a few hours with Gemini Pro and Claude and created a sync tool using C# that does the migration and keeps the network share in sync with SharePoint until we do the final cutover. I don't expect to ever use this tool again, and that's totally fine. I'll still put it on GitHub in case someone has a use for it, but I'm not sure why I should lament the fact that this tool exists and may never see another use or the fact that I won't maintain it.
Don't waste your life playing with shiny new toys, sure, but learning how to use AI by creating things is not a waste of time.
I would be wary of using McLuhan-like media analysis of AI. His central argument is that media are tools that extend man's ability. A calculator or a spell checker extend our thinking and writing. AI does not extend those abilities so much as it completely replaces it.
The way in which it does resemble media is insofar as it captures the same urge that McLuhan wrote about to see ourselves extended into the world. McLuhan tied this to the myth of Narcissus. The difference is that where Narcissus falsely believed it wasn't him and fell in love with what he saw, we falsely believe the image we see is ourselves and fall in love with it.
At the grocery store there's countless (no pun) opportunities to do math in the sense of comparing prices and calculating unit costs etc, but most people can't do that math easily in their head because the calculator has made that skill less important.
But people also don't pull out the calculator repeatedly to do this in the grocery store, so the math just doesn't get done.
When friends start dying within 10 years of your age, it's a hell of a wake up.
"I wish I'd made more throw away apps I never use" ... said no one on their death bed, ever.