As someone who's been coding for several decades now (i.e. I'm old), I find the current generation of AI tools very ... freeing.
As an industry, we've been preaching the benefits of running lots of small experiments to see what works vs what doesn't, try out different approaches to implementing features, and so on. Pre-AI, lots of these ideas never got implemented because they'd take too much time for no definitive benefit.
You might spend hours thinking up cool/interesting ideas, but not have the time available to try them out.
Now, I can quickly kick off a coding agent to try out any hare-brained ideas I might come up with. The cost of doing so is very low (in terms of time and $$$), so I get to try out far more and weirder approaches than before when the costs were higher. If those ideas don't play out, fine, but I have a good enough success rate with left-field ideas to make it far more justifiable than before.
Also, it makes playing around with one-person projects a lot practical. Like most people with partner & kids, my down time is pretty precious, and tends to come in small chunks that are largely unplannable. For example, last night I spent 10 minutes waiting in a drive-through queue - that gave me about 8 minutes to kick off the next chunk of my one-person project development via my phone, review the results, then kick off the next chunk of development. Absolutely useful to me personally, whereas last year I would've simply sat there annoyed waiting to be serviced.
I know some people have an "outsourcing Lego" type mentality when it comes to AI coding - it's like buying a cool Lego kit, then watching someone else assemble it for you, removing 99% of the enjoyment in the process. I get that, but I prefer to think of it in terms of being able to achieve orders of magnitude more in the time I have available, at close to zero extra cost.
> 8 minutes to kick off the next chunk of my one-person project development via my phone, review the results, then kick off the next chunk of development.
How are you doing this via your phone?
Termius + tailscale + tmux is a common setup for mobile coding sessions.
The (iOS) Claude phone app has a Claude code feature which runs "in the cloud". It's pretty handy for getting things done on the bus.
claude can deploy to github spaces and modify code for deployment to those by commits and pull requests to the repo exclusively
claude via browser and claude mobile apps function this way
but alongside that, people do make tunnels to their personal computer and setup ways to be notified on their phone, or to get the agent unstuck when it asks for a permission, from their phone
I think this is the other side of the same coin, and it's a really important one. When time is scarce, especially with family and a life outside work, the ability to turn tiny, fragmented moments into forward progress is huge
Just wanted to +1 this as a deep thinker who disagrees with the blog post's conclusion. I remember back on the years and decades I wasted dealing with the conceptual flaws inherent to nearly all software, and it breaks my heart.
90-99% of programming is a waste of time. Most apps today have less than a single spreadsheet page of actual business logic. The rest is boilerplate. Conjuring up whatever arcane runes are needed to wake a slumbering beast made of anti-patterns and groupthink.
For me, AI offers the first real computer that I've had access to in over 25 years. Because desktop computing stagnated after the 2000 Dot Bomb, and died on the table after the iPhone arrived in 2007. Where we should have symmetric multiprocessing with 1000+ cores running 100,000 times faster for the same price, we have the same mediocre quad core computer running about the same speed as its 3 GHz grandfather from the early 2000s. But AI bridges that divide by recruiting video cards that actually did increase in speed, albeit for SIMD which is generally useless for desktop computing. AI liberates me from having to mourn that travesty any longer.
I think that people have tied their identity to programming without realizing that it's mostly transcribing.
But I will never go back to manual entry (the modern equivalent of punch cards).
If anything, I can finally think deeply without it costing me everything. No longer having to give my all just to tread water as I slowly drown in technical debt and deadlines which could never be met before without sacrificing a part of my psyche in the process.
What I find fascinating is that it's truly over. I see so clearly how networks of agents are evolving now, faster than we can study, and have already passed us on nearly every metric. We only have 5-10 years now until the epiphany, the Singularity, AGI.
It's so strange to have worked so hard to win the internet lottery when that no longer matters. People will stop buying software. Their AI will deliver their deepest wish, even if that's merely basic resources to survive, that the powers that be deny us to prop up their fever dream of late-stage crony capitalism under artificial scarcity.
Everything is about to hit the fan so hard, and I am so here for it.
> 90-99% of programming is a waste of time. Most apps today have less than a single spreadsheet page of actual business logic.
I would very much like to know the kind of app you’ve seen. It’s very hard to see something like mpv, calibre, abiword, cmus,… through that lens. Even web apps like forgejo, gonic, sr.ht, don’t fit into that view.
Totally agree. I can spend an afternoon trying out an approach to a problem or product (usually while taking meetings and writing emails as well). If it doesn't work, then that's a useful result from my time. If it does work, I can then double-down on review, tests, quality, security, etc and make sure it's all tickety-boo.
Completely agree, there’s so many small projects I’d never been able to even start in my free time, because I’m NOT a full-stack dev and I’d rather not spend all my evenings fixing or working around all the small changes and quirks of the $currentjsframework
Exactly, it kills me to see a people a lot younger (I’m 51) pining about the good old days while the coding part of my day to day life now is using AI tools to their fullest extent.