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.

  • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    61·
    1 day ago

    Then I apologise about my ignorance on the matter, but you’re now making the same point as the author - were you mocking or sharing their perspective?

    There’s a lot that goes behind “work” that you don’t see in the final output. It’s important to care about that art, and a shallow copy is just not the same as “the real thing”. Right?

    • plumbercraicEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      Both, I think? Respecting the craft and expertise of the way we used to do things is important, but the author is being melodramatic and I wanted to poke some fun.

    • WanderingThoughts@europe.pubEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      That’s something people have wondered since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Is a mechanically mass produced widget the real thing? People even make fun of the biological locally grown artisanal produced food and the recycled hand made furniture. Shein is quite popular with their fast fashion. Except the rich will have tailor made clothes of course.