Disclaimer: This post was written May 2025, and the arguments apply to AI code capabilities at this time. The arguments around lack of competence are certainly likely to become less prevalent-while the parts about the desecration of the joys of programming, and fundamental human understanding of programming-are likely to become

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.

  • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    142·
    1 day ago

    He is right, but most will choose convenience. And I do believe that people in the future will suffer for it. The brain is like a muscle; you have to use it to keep your mind sharp. I fear that in the future will lack critical thinking or frustration tolerance because AI makes it so easy.

    • Zexks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      14 hours ago

      Congratulations. You just made the same thousand year old argument made against books. It’s amazing how some shit just won’t die.

    • Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      510·
      1 day ago

      Look we can make the same argument for all tech. I’m sure someone said the same thing about numbers when the abacus was invented, and then the same thing when the first calculators came out.

      The existence of cars has not stopped people from running, because they realize that running is not only pleasurable but also necessary for our health.

      As always the complacent masses will let their natural abilities atrophy and let tech take care of it. It doesn’t matter, they were never going to be better anyways because that would have required effort. Those who have the drive, curiosity and desire will still choose to do things the painstaking way, just like there’s people out there that choose to interact with their OS using the command line only in 2025 when GUIs exist and are less painful to use.