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Discussion (19 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
As much as you would have aspirations to be a pro soccer player, badly enough broken leg can prevent you from ever being good enough.
Your imagination of being pro player does go away when in reality you’re not fit for the purpose.
And something I wish the current crop of AI startups learn as well, just making XYZ agentic maybe isn't the answer to everything.
Same folks that said crypto will destroy traditional finance are now saying stuff like, AI will "destroy" all jobs and create a permanent underclass. Almost feels like every few years a new cult gets created with messaging perfectly designed to trigger the Gen-Z(/current college generation) into a frenzy and drinking the kool-aid.
Can't wait for it to be over (and then to do it all over again with something else). Being in my 30s helps. I care less :)
Maybe "things going bad suddenly in the near future" is just such a captivating idea to the human mind that those narratives will always find a way to dominate vs "everything will continue to slowly get better".
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.
My current business is profitable. Almost everything we built was still useless. Since 4 yrs ago.
The amount of effort that went into that "almost" Is something that I don't think AI moved any needle for even though half of our journey was after AI coding took off.
Speed of coding was never the problem, still isn't even if AI allegedly 10x-ed it.
If you're doing something that isn't like how people are used to things being done, is novel, or is contra to common beliefs, there's a good chance that nobody will believe in you. And in such situations, their lack of belief is not a reliable indicator of whether what you're doing is valid or correct. Most people's negative responses in such cases are emotional responses, not rational ones.
In such situations, "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 not opposites.
It does require you to think carefully about what constitutes validation or invalidation of your ideas, though.
The first is getting market feedback.
The second is just getting opinions.
Probably not so different from past hype cycles, except maybe this time it will be different!
Who is responsible for this mess? ;)