As an industry, we've been preaching the benefits of running lots of small experiments to see what works vs what doesn't, try out different approaches to implementing features, and so on. Pre-AI, lots of these ideas never got implemented because they'd take too much time for no definitive benefit.
You might spend hours thinking up cool/interesting ideas, but not have the time available to try them out.
Now, I can quickly kick off a coding agent to try out any hare-brained ideas I might come up with. The cost of doing so is very low (in terms of time and $$$), so I get to try out far more and weirder approaches than before when the costs were higher. If those ideas don't play out, fine, but I have a good enough success rate with left-field ideas to make it far more justifiable than before.
Also, it makes playing around with one-person projects a lot practical. Like most people with partner & kids, my down time is pretty precious, and tends to come in small chunks that are largely unplannable. For example, last night I spent 10 minutes waiting in a drive-through queue - that gave me about 8 minutes to kick off the next chunk of my one-person project development via my phone, review the results, then kick off the next chunk of development. Absolutely useful to me personally, whereas last year I would've simply sat there annoyed waiting to be serviced.
I know some people have an "outsourcing Lego" type mentality when it comes to AI coding - it's like buying a cool Lego kit, then watching someone else assemble it for you, removing 99% of the enjoyment in the process. I get that, but I prefer to think of it in terms of being able to achieve orders of magnitude more in the time I have available, at close to zero extra cost.
90-99% of programming is a waste of time. Most apps today have less than a single spreadsheet page of actual business logic. The rest is boilerplate. Conjuring up whatever arcane runes are needed to wake a slumbering beast made of anti-patterns and groupthink.
For me, AI offers the first real computer that I've had access to in over 25 years. Because desktop computing stagnated after the 2000 Dot Bomb, and died on the table after the iPhone arrived in 2007. Where we should have symmetric multiprocessing with 1000+ cores running 100,000 times faster for the same price, we have the same mediocre quad core computer running about the same speed as its 3 GHz grandfather from the early 2000s. But AI bridges that divide by recruiting video cards that actually did increase in speed, albeit for SIMD which is generally useless for desktop computing. AI liberates me from having to mourn that travesty any longer.
I think that people have tied their identity to programming without realizing that it's mostly transcribing.
But I will never go back to manual entry (the modern equivalent of punch cards).
If anything, I can finally think deeply without it costing me everything. No longer having to give my all just to tread water as I slowly drown in technical debt and deadlines which could never be met before without sacrificing a part of my psyche in the process.
What I find fascinating is that it's truly over. I see so clearly how networks of agents are evolving now, faster than we can study, and have already passed us on nearly every metric. We only have 5-10 years now until the epiphany, the Singularity, AGI.
It's so strange to have worked so hard to win the internet lottery when that no longer matters. People will stop buying software. Their AI will deliver their deepest wish, even if that's merely basic resources to survive, that the powers that be deny us to prop up their fever dream of late-stage crony capitalism under artificial scarcity.
Everything is about to hit the fan so hard, and I am so here for it.
I would very much like to know the kind of app you’ve seen. It’s very hard to see something like mpv, calibre, abiword, cmus,… through that lens. Even web apps like forgejo, gonic, sr.ht, don’t fit into that view.
I know that programming has gone terribly wrong, but it's hard for me to articulate how, because it's all of it - the entire frontend web development ecosystem, mobile development languages and frameworks, steep learning curve languages like Rust that were supposed to make things easier but put the onus on the developer to get the busywork right, everything basically. It's like trying to explain screws to craftsmen only familiar with nails.
In the simplest terms, it's because corporations are driving the development of those tools and vacuuming up all profits on the backs of open sources maintainers working in their parents' basements, rather than universities working from first principles to solve hard problems and give solutions away to everyone for free for the good of society. We've moved from academia to slavery and call it progress.