As for the animations...

The second animation is a bit more... High fidelity in some areas? I don't know what to even call it. The clash of different pixel art styles is what I find jarring[^1].

But I guess my point was that neither animation is even _good_... Like both of them barely pass a cursory glance; there's lot of nonsense going on in both of them, that wouldn't get past any animator. So, I wouldn't say one is better or worse; they just different

[^1]: Edit for context, I used and even made _a lot_ of pixel art in primary school and my teens lol

But this thread is a bit like the "I could have drawn that" comment you hear from Average Joe saying about a Mondrian painting. Yes, you can mimic something (with or without AI) but you wouldn't have made _this_.

Don't get me wrong the 0->1 copycat site is impressive, but it lacks a lot of attention to detail the original has.

The art and engineer snob voice in me is also causing a bit of cognitive dissonance about this though. C'est la vie, funny times we live in

Edit: my point is different techniques are fine in different contexts

As someone who thinks AI is an incredible tool, I think your job is safe. Are there incompetent companies that are replacing people with AI? Yup... But also, I'm pretty sure most people don't want to work at companies with such poor management anyway? So in a way, I think AI is prefiltering incompetent management for us.

On you other two points: I kinda feel you, but I'm finding ways of enjoying my work with AI. It's been a bit of a shift and I'm still adjusting probably, but it feels like it's getting better. I never really enjoyed "typing" code, but the creative process of designing solutions and building the. And I never thought typing was the "building" part, it was just an unavoidable mechanical "obstacle" (not using the word obstacle as a bad thing necessarily, but idk it's just typing you know?)

Heck, I have non-stem friends for which "pop culture" activities like wordle, pub quizzes, and film/TV are the most engaging thing intellectually. I'm not sure what they would have done if they live in the past. Would they find something else?

I can't tell what's happening here...

Did we all extract a different conclusion/meaning from the piece?

Did a bunch of people discover the same new word recently, and are learning to use it?

Did people not read the full post perhaps, and jumped to conclusions?

I don't think the author is advocating or engaging in escapism here... Did I misunderstand the post?

I've worked with an absolute leetcode beast and had a masters in CS. He insisted we use Redis for a project with a lot of relational data. We ended up building a mini relational database on top of redis. Whatever you're imagining about the dev experience, it was worse. He was a lead/senior engineer at the company. Turns out he never bothered to properly learn SQL because he didn't like it. C'est la vie, ggs I guess.

One of the best engineers I worked with was a biochemist who fell in love with programming through chance.

Most of the people I admired in the industry are self taught and passionate about the craft; a lot of them are also immigrants who didn't have access to prestigeus unis. Some went to uni but admit they've been programming since before that.

You can't really learn to be passionate about the craft and to enjoy learning at any uni.

Like it did everything:

- this is not a Linux system (true, it was macOS) - it is not an available command - the binary is corrupted - node/js is more precise - V8 JavaScript is faster than bash (true technically??? But not in this context lol) - JavaScript is more versatile

I forgot what else we went through but there were a few more things. I indulged it because it was incredulous and funny. The prompts from my side were all questions, never instructions. I assume an instruction would've helped here, but also I don't think Opus ever did this (but on the other hand Opus wrote python scripts to format/indent, instead of just running cargo fmt, so I guess potato potato)

I agree that intuition is important, and that it's sometimes easier to develop correct intuition without a conflicting bias/habit, BUT... I don't think traditional engineering skills conflict with using AI tools. If anything it's more important, but maybe that's just the recently sprouted gay hair on my head talking

Also, it'll run a formatter, read, edit to undo auto formatting and then continue on its merry way. What is the point of that??? Lol

It's an algorithm (albeit an expensive one) designed to produce engaging output. It's not a doctor, it's definitely not more capable than experts in their fields. It's not replacing anyone, same way pocket calculators didn't replace people 50 years ago.

Unless you're being sarcastic because of all the fearmongering in news? In that case, the joke went over my head lol

I've been trying to get into agentic coding and there are non-refactoring instances where I might reac for it (like any time I need to work on something using tailwind; I'm dyslexic and I'd get actual headaches, not exaggerating, trying to decipher Tailwind gibberish while juggling their docs before AIs came around)

This isn't unusual when people are sleep deprived though. I think lots of people just don't realise they are hallucinating in that state