Ask HN: Handle Demotivation

I honestly just can't fathom how this a common take right now. We're so far away from AI being a genuinely reliable for software developers. It's basically just StackOverflow+, sometimes even worse because of hallucinations and not being able to use your intuition to sniff out the better answers. Did software development becomes less popular or in demand since the invention of StackOverflow? No, the hobby and profession has grown tremendously since then. These things are productivity enhancers (for some), nothing more.

If your apathy comes from believing that much better models (which will render programming a pointless endeavour) are right around the corner then I just think you're buying into the hype and your prediction is way off. The current models are trained on all the data available, there is nothing more to learn from. As public information grows then the scope of answers will grow, and as models improve they will emulate human responses better. Will they get better at programming? They're only as good as the training data, which will ALWAYS be unreliable and full of errors or missing context, how could it be any other way?

Write less software.

My love died the moment I was paid to build other people's stuff for 40 hours a week.

Now I use programming in support of other tasks and I can't get enough of it. It became fun again, like cooking for myself after quitting as a line cook.

AI feels rather useless to me. It can generate bullshit but it can hardly blaze new trails. It's great for dealing with the tedium, but not for solving problems that require a great deal of context.

I don't pay much attention to all noise about generative AI (although I must admit, I'm so impressed with chatgpt). This might be wishful thinking but I do believe AI has looooong way before it will be able to fix bugs in existing systems.

When I feel like loosing motivation I go and play a few clashes [1], this always cheers me up :)

https://www.codingame.com/multiplayer/clashofcode

AI cant design software. You can ask it to to do X and it will do X if X is simple enough. Ask it to "Create an API for unifying financial APIs" and it will not do squat.