I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real progress was made when I actually dig into the documentation of colmap/OpenMVS (essential tools, which I had never used before, in my workflow).

The AI gave me unprecedented turn around time in experimentation. The same experiments would easily take me over a month in the past. Now it was a few days. But still, real progress is made only when my understanding catch up with reality.

> And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.

Building technology to overcome relatable hardships and frictions is a worthy challenge full of meaning.

Using someone else's technology to erase frictions and hardships from your life can erode meaning.

On my worst days I am convinced programming and technological optimism is a theft of meaning; personal satisfaction at solving a human problem awkwardly mapped to technology, at the expense of users dating, socializing, or consuming with discomfort and therefore the possibility of growth and meaning.

As someone who used to have an incredibly hard time putting my app in front of users, or asking for feedback, or getting rejected, etc:

Posts like this one always made me feel like I was a coward. Like there was.. unvirtuousness.. in not killing one’s darlings, not validating ideas, not quitting things in time, not looking for product-market fit.

I can report that looking for product-market fit, and everything else from the list above, became easier once I started taking antidepressants and adhd meds.

For example, it turns out deciding to punch yourself in the face with reality is much easier when you don’t feel, for example, like abandoning a project would be a giant betrayal and a thing one might in theory do but you must never do ever under any circumstances.

- - -

There are likely many people who have more capacity for self control, and who are genuinely helped by hearing moderately harsh truths because they can (1) take a look at their behavior, (2) realize it hurts them and their chances of success, (3) realize where they’ve been blind to reality, and (4) change.

I suspect that such people assume — maybe correctly in most cases — that if someone hasn’t done (4), it’s because they haven’t done enough (1-3), and this is the appropriate lever to push.

I don’t know how to finish this comment.

This quote from Philip K Dick seems relevant:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

I'm a creative person so my brain requires that I make something every day. Sometimes I make stuff that isn't very good. I've been told a lot by former bosses and random people that my desire to build stuff is frivolous. I could punch myself in the face with this reality, but then I would stop building.

I have found that it gets some of the "cruft" out of the work, freeing me to do more work.

Since starting to use LLMs, I have actually been spending more time, at the console, than before.

One reason is that I like to ship (as opposed to "code"). That means a lot of tedious, boring stuff. The kind of thing that I want to "take a break before tackling," so I may take 30 minutes, and watch something on TV for a while, before rolling up my sleeves.

Now, the LLM can take care of a lot of this stuff, so I am not motivated to "take a break," so much, anymore.

It doesn't actually feel bad, but I now have to schedule "downtime." I never used to have to do that, before. My work always involved a lot of "context switch" points; naturally set up for taking breaks.

While it's true that unsupervised AIs build a heap of trash, I have to admit, it doesn't look much worse than some of the code I saw powering products that sold for millions.

The only thing that changed is the scale.

"Being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not" and "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you" are opposites.

> Who can punch themselves in the face with reality the most? This is who will win in the age of AI.

Reminds me of a politician in India who would ask elders in his family to slap him hard before he starts out on the election campaigns. He says that the slaps are meant to keep him alert and honest.

Such a great synopsis. The things that are easy to signal (landing page, presentation deck, logo, etc) have never been the make-or-break aspect. The part that's always been hard, that remains hard, is that a business must solve a problem for people. Even B2B is solving business problems for specific people. And people are a difficult, difficult problem to solve.

If 90% of tech startups failed in the past, AI pushes that that rate to over 99%.

Cloud was like this too. You spent all this money as a startup with AWS regardless of whether you made a dollar or not.

> If all you know is how to build, and you just use AI as an excuse to keep building more and more and more, you are just procrastinating and avoiding reality.

I’ve had this sense about AI for a while now and this articulates that feeling far better than I’ve been able to.

>Figure out why you were put on this earth.

Who is responsible for this mess? ;)

I feel bruised

> I have seen way too many startup founders delude themselves into building more and more for months without a single conversation with a real user

This has been a problem since the beginning of tech startups. I worked in a dot-com in the late 1990s. Lots of investor money. New offices. Hundreds of employees. The product was well thought out, fairly well built, and it worked. But they had no customers. It's even in the same market niche as products that today have millions of users, but those folks weren't ready for it in 1999, at least not enough of them and quickly enough to matter.

Building something quickly is only a small part of what it takes to have a successful startup. You must solve a problem for people who are ready for your solution and willing to pay for it.

Reminds me of the part in "Silicon Valley" where they launched and couldn't figure out why no-one (except engineers) became real users.

"Nature cannot be fooled"

No this isn't punching yourself in the face. Not for swes.

What's written above is self confirmation that you are better than AI and that you will always have a job because you are better because AI can't build something that works. That stuff about convincing yourself you're building something useful is actually the easy question.

Punching yourself in the face involves telling truths that are incredibly hard to stomach. That you don't matter, that all your years of coding and your identity is about to be consumed by a machine that is superior. The fact that you still hold a rank as a software engineer right now is only because that machine is slightly worse than you. But as it improves, your role becomes meaningless. The life you built your skills around becomes meaningless. It is less about what AI is now and more about the trajectory of AI and what the current AI says about the AI of the near tomorrow. We don't code by hand anymore and this came about in less than 5 years since the popular rise of LLMs. Think about what the next 5 years will bring.

That is punching yourself in the face with reality^^

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Click biat. Sorry.