The thing I hate the most about AI and it’s ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots. […]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians—full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to “review this AI-generated patchset” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.
Unusually well-written piece on the threat AI poses to programming as an art form.
I think at most of the disdain comes from the business side. Sure I can opt out of AI at home but at work I’m constantly getting asked how AI has helped my productivity and potentially “graded” on how much or how effectively I use it. Business doesn’t care about your personal fulfillment, just your productivity, and if they grind you into dust to w acchere you no longer find any joy or motivation in your work they’ll get the next college graduate that’s already used AI for 80% of their assignments and wonder why quality has tanked, integrations are failing, security breaches are up, and energy costs have doubled.
A coworker that regularly uses AI code assistants asked me to review 78 brand new files he made. That really puts my back against the wall. Do I spend a day going through everything “the old way”? Do I ask AI to summarize each function to bridge the gap in knowledge? Do I ask it, file by file, if it sees any issues? Or do I just rubber stamp it because I should the million-dollar product my boss thinks I should use more than Google or official docs?
PRs still need to be reasonable size for human review, regardless of how they were authored. IMO
Yeah but when you complain you are seen as slowing down progress. Your college wrote all of this useful code and now you are blocking it from being deployed? Our shareholders want to know that we are winning the AI race so we need to release this feature asap. How can we unblock this? I have added 3 new engineers to the team let’s make sure this gets out today!!
The man-hour myth will never die in the management class
Tell your coworker to review it with his AI and then ship it.