Side projects

I wrote this last week I didn’t really edit or finish and I just want to tell you about it. I was talking with addison about this tonight. I’m just so distressed about it

I use AI a ton at work. It’s a remarkable tool. I’m sure you’re pretty up on it, but I can tell you without a doubt that it is better at coding than anyone on pretty much every metric. It’s arguably at the level where it is as good as anyone at making good code “taste” decisions beyond just “making things work”. Within the last few months, the models and the tooling around them crossed a line between “constantly frustrating” and “trustworthy”. It’s obviously still poor at truly creative things and tasks that ask for a constant human eye. Most people that are spending a lot of time using it for this stuff are coping in a few different ways: “this is the most powerful thing ever and if I don’t maximize it I will be left behind” or “because I had the vague idea, it’s still my work” or “the new expression of skill comes from how you manage the agents”.

I used to have a lot of fun working on side projects, and it was nice that my hobby was the same muscle I was developing at work. Felt like either made me better at the other, and being able to work on something that I thought was cool instead of something that I felt I have to provided enough separation. It’s now hard to justify working on side projects when I know that I am working in a way that will either produce “worse” output at 1/10th the speed or be disconnected from the output. It’s taken some fun out of the work, but more importantly, I obviously don’t feel like I could be proud of what I create with it. It even feels stupid to try to do some half measure where I’m just using it for parts of the work to assist me, like as a search engine. I basically feel like anything I could do with it is tainted with inauthenticity, and that that is the description of anything written by people that want to write any meaningful software going forward. At work it bothers me less because one thing that it’s good at is taking my exemplary codebase and self expression is not really the goal. I’m working on some other projects, but most of me thinks it’s not really scratching the self-expression itch, and I probably need to find a different hobby.