People who want to write code hate AI because it's doing the part they wanted to do.

People who want the end product of the code love AI because they want anything that helps them get to the end product faster.

The person who wrote this post feels oddly in neither camp. They like playing with the AI and seeing what comes out the other end. Some of the projects they boast about having built aren't even usable projects, like when they had it mock up a UI of a product and then got bored and moved on to the next before writing a backend.

I think the biggest difference is that I no longer care about what people think about me and how I am perceived, so the motivation to publish my work went down to near zero. I used to build open source stuff, I no longer want to spend time on preparing stuff for publishing, making it available, dealing with people who will inevitably want something of me eventually. There just isn't enough time.

I can still be baited into responding on HN for some reason, and I am trying to work on that, because that is the ultimate waste of time.

My younger self was always excited when the latest tech came out, when the latest MSDN arrived, etc. But the last 15 or so years, I totally lost interest. I still love writing code but the desire for the latest and greatest had fade.

These LLMs were dogshit for a while, but I would keep returning to them.

Now I am excited again.

I work on a large web project with lots of legacy that is slowly being rewritten and copilot and codex are helping a lot by first writing tests for the old code, and then converting to the new.

I thought we'd never finish, but now I can see how we can do it.

It's brought a bit of the fun back into the game.

Yeah, it does make me wonder though - have these AI boosters never written their own tools before? I've written, for my own personal use, literally thousands of tiny little bash scripts, vim scripts, emacs scripts, Python programs, C programs, etc. I still daily use a music player (wish wrapper around mpg123) that I did in 2001[1]!

And yet, I'd be the first to admit that, for each 1000 things I wrote, probably 1 got permanent use for a significant length of time; the value, over time, to me was the lessons learned.

Now people are going through that cycle faster (i.e. instead of doing 5000 persona-use programs over 30 years, they're doing it in a single year), but the end result is still going to be the same - no one is ever gonna use it, including themselves!

It comes with an additional downside - you don't actually learn anything by having the AI generate your programs for you.

--------------------------------

[1] In case anyone is interested why I wanted a wrapper - it uses the locatedb so that I don't have to search for my mp3s:

    #!/usr/bin/wish
    # Copyright Lelanthran K. Manickum 2002, provided under BSD license
    #

    set version "1.0"

    proc playSong {songname} {
       set rc [catch { exec killall -9 mpg123 }]
       if {$songname=="\[Stop Playback]"} {
          .midFrame.lblPlaying configure -text "Stopped"
          return 0;
       }
       set rc [catch { exec mpg123 --loop -1 "$songname" & }]
       if {$rc==0} {
          .midFrame.lblPlaying configure -text "Playing: $songname"
       }
    }

    proc locateSongs {pattern} {
       .lstResults delete 0 999999999
       set tmpvar [split [exec locate -i "*$pattern*.mp3"] "\n"]
       .lstResults insert 0 "\[Stop Playback]"
       foreach title $tmpvar {
          .lstResults insert 1 $title
       }
    }

    frame .topFrame 
    frame .midFrame

    entry .topFrame.entSearchString -text "Search String"
    button .topFrame.btnSearch -text "Search" -command {locateSongs [.topFrame.entSearchString get]}
    listbox .lstResults -yscrollcommand {.sby set} -xscrollcommand {.sbx set}
    scrollbar .sby -orien vert -command {.lstResults yview}
    scrollbar .sbx -orien horiz -command {.lstResults xview}
    label .midFrame.lblPlaying -text "Stopped"

    locateSongs ""
    focus .topFrame.entSearchString

    bind .topFrame.entSearchString <Return> ".topFrame.btnSearch invoke"
    bind .lstResults <Double-B1-ButtonRelease> {playSong [.lstResults get active]}
    bind .lstResults <Return> {playSong [.lstResults get active]}


    grid .topFrame -row 0 -column 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .topFrame.entSearchString -column 0 -row 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .topFrame.btnSearch -column 1 -row 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .midFrame -column 0 -row 1 -sticky nsew
    grid .midFrame.lblPlaying -column 0 -row 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .lstResults -column 0 -row 2 -sticky nsew 
    grid .sby -column 1 -row 2 -sticky nsew 
    grid .sbx -column 0 -row 3 -sticky nsew 

    grid rowconfigure .topFrame 0 -weight 1
    grid columnconfigure .topFrame 0 -weight 1
    grid rowconfigure . 2 -weight 2
    grid columnconfigure . 0 -weight 2

    wm protocol . WM_DELETE_WINDOW {
        set rc [catch { exec killall -9 mpg123 } ]
        destroy .
    }

    wm title . "Simple Music Player - v$version"
    wm geometry . 700x500

If you optimized for minimizing deathbed regret perhaps you'd regret that on your deathbed!

If I have cogent thoughts on my deathbed I expect they'll be along the lines of "I wish I wasn't dying" and not regretting the many ways I enjoyed my time on Earth (which includes vibe coding apps nobody uses).