What in the world? I’ve built a thing by hand before and enjoyed the process of doing it. I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’ve also built many things with AI and enjoyed them much less.

I think the reason so many people are frustrated is that they _know_ they are falling behind, they _know_ the thing that they like doing is not something they can easily get employed to do. That sucks.

Do you actually believe that people don’t know whether they are enjoying a task or not?

The problem is that you're not putting as much effort into building things with AI as you were by hand. If you were, it would still be satisfying

I think this might be true, but I think it's because it's more difficult to saturate my thinking capacity when building with AI rather than just laziness (which I am reading as the implication of your comment, perhaps incorrectly).

Building with AI requires spending time on non-thinking tasks like stopping the AI from doing stupid stuff, loading context from different tasks when working on multiple things in parallel, and waiting for responses when not working on multiple things in parallel. With manual programming, though, you have a single task in front of you and are fully focused on that task. In that task, there are innumerable micro-tasks that you handle sequentially which each require some thinking: how to organize code to be readable in the future, working out the logic of a sequence of if statements, deciding on types to use, etc.

AI handles all those micro-decisions for you which yes, might free up your mind to think about higher-level problems (to the extent that you don't spend your time deslopping AI output), but also requires a very different style of thinking that is at least for me, much less natural and much less enjoyable.

>I think the reason so many people are frustrated is that they _know_ they are falling behind, they _know_ the thing that they like doing is not something they can easily get employed to do.

I'm frustrated because I'm in a den of thieves and no one sees anything wrong with it. These constant "car vs. horse carriage" metaphors miss the whole point, and isn't even correct (a car did not need to reference a horse).

People love talking about how efficient LLMs made them but don't ever seem to acknowledge how this is also linked to how scams and grifts have gone through the roof. I get 20+ spam calls a day and need to wade around a sea of slop just to enjoy my day-to-day. That's on top of a mess of a job market with thousands of fake resumes clogging up recruiter boxes, rampant cheating in schools, and the entire mess that is my country's politics.

It's not just "fear of losing my job" (I lost that long ago, I adapted and did what I needed to do to survive). I've had to constantly adapt all my life, that's not the primary issue. But adaptation comes with the expectation of new goals and passions and overall optimism of the fututre. That's not the case at all right now.

The issue is everything else around me literally collapsing and yet people are just sipping their tea here acting like it's just AI envy. The gaslighting is annoying, the apathy is alarming. If no one else is going to pick up the broken glass, what's the point of anything?