Why Am I Still Programming
10 points by tombh
10 points by tombh
If you remove the choices from all the little things that go into making the software, you start to make the same thing as everybody else. And I think that's just a less interesting place to be. And I think that the end result of a really well-built piece of software comes from people who have opinions and want to take a viewpoint on something.
For me, this echoes why most AI "art" feels so empty and pointless to me. A work of art represents thousands of deliberate decisions by the artist. If those decisions were made automatically - the placement of sun and clouds in the background, the addition of a fish to the bicycle basket - there's no value to be had from even glancing at them.
This might sound unnecessarily emotional for the software engineering field, but I no longer like reviewing code. Previously, you could spot your colleagues’ coding style, some funny typos and have interesting discussions on their decisions.
Now, as soon as I see “Co-Authored by Claude Opus”, I immediately understand that, as Simon wrote above, everything here is mechanical and the author might not even have read this piece of code themselves.
Writing code (for me) has always been emotional, whether it's frustration, pride, or that eureka feeling when I write something that works the first time. The whimsy I can read in others' code has always been reassurance that others felt the same.
Art intentionally exposes those truths to the viewer that are not easily communicated. AI generated content isn’t attempting to communicate that which is difficult to communicate. It is effectively noise, camouflage on top of an otherwise blank spot that someone decided something (anything) should exist.