Because I'm guessing your passion was for the craft and not just the result.
Before there were factories, if you wanted a chair you needed an artisan to make one for you. When factories pumed out chairs, there was no need for the artisan to make chairs. But building factories that made chairs was a craft in itself. If you wanted a factory to make chairds, you needed an artisan to set one up for you. A craft became redundant, but enabled another to exist.
It's natural to mourn a craft that becomes redundant. But such an event is not unique.
I do think there is something different about AI, though, in that it attacks the craft of cognition itself. At some point there's no room for a human artisan to build on top. The required faculties become too great for any human mind.
Haiku OS has gone up to 6y between releases. While not entirely inactive in that time, lurkers who aren't as motivated to dig for signs of life could reasonably conclude the project is inactive.
Matrox Mystique for my first build. Free MechWarrior and plenty of time burned there. Good times. It can be startling how thousands of dollars of premium gear can become e-waste in short order.
This begs an importent question: how? How do you filter without putting up barriers that high quality contributors will not want to climb?
I ask both as a maintainer who has been overwhelmed and as someone who declines to participate in communities where the bar is set too high for casual drive-by contributions.
Many people who enjoyed building and coding things are going through this right now, myself included.
In my case, I felt that I was pretty good at rapid product prototyping and had made that part of my identity. Then AI agents made it trivial. It took me some time to process and accept that reality. But I’m okay with it now. I simply had to move on.
After a while, I found two things that have helped:
1. Leaning into other areas where AI can boost my skills rather than just replace them, such as writing (for example, my last two posts made it to the front page of HN) and sales (leads, proposals, etc)
2. Taking on more ambitious projects. I used to think about side projects I could complete in days, and now I think more about projects I can complete in months. With AI, days have become hours and months have become days, so I simply try to think of projects that would have taken me a long time before.
Nothing stop to us to introduce something like `Co-authored-by:` but for AI, like `AI-Assisted-by: <harness/model>` / `AI-Paired-by: <harness/model>` / `AI-Copiloted-by: <harness/model>` / `AI-Automated-by: <harness/model>`.
Are they related? The twitch stream definitely didn't have nudes while I was watching (while the other link seems to be ~constant nudity). Also the twitch description was something like "With new/fixed content moderation" or something similar (so might be right that they've had moderation problems before)
> I reckon powertools is the wrong comparison, my grandfather was a cabinetmaker(born in the 1930's) and he never shied away from using a powertool & any contractors/tradesman largely raves about their favourite brand of powertools.
I suspect there's some survivorship bias at play here. You don't hear what the tradesmen who shied away from using powertools thought because they ceased to find work as tradesmen.
In the same way, future software engineers will all be raving about their favorite coding agent.
This is either incredibly advanced, genius-level insight into the future of software engineering, or absolutely nonsensical gibberish. I'm not smart enough to tell which, I suppose we'll find out.
So you’re being pedantic? Future forecasts and estimates can’t mesh with the trolly problem? If that’s your stance sure, you are correct. I do feel like you missed the whole point of the exercise though, and are hiding behind an absolute that is never achievable.
dhh understands what a good user experience is. Installing in a couple minutes and getting right into it is an amazing start compared to most operating systems that take ages to setup.
Plus, many pre-installs (like Zoom) are web-apps that take no space (30 lines of text) and are easy to remove if you don't want them in the menu.
Before there were factories, if you wanted a chair you needed an artisan to make one for you. When factories pumed out chairs, there was no need for the artisan to make chairs. But building factories that made chairs was a craft in itself. If you wanted a factory to make chairds, you needed an artisan to set one up for you. A craft became redundant, but enabled another to exist.
It's natural to mourn a craft that becomes redundant. But such an event is not unique.
I do think there is something different about AI, though, in that it attacks the craft of cognition itself. At some point there's no room for a human artisan to build on top. The required faculties become too great for any human mind.