It was also about reproducibility. The ability to bootstrap from almost nothing (of course we can’t fab our own CPUs but with riscv we’re closer to the silicon than we’ve ever been). Software could always be brought back. And now the reliance is too much on closed source ecosystems. And open weights are about as open as an “open exe”. Yes the bits are there but they are almost meaningless, not reproducible.

I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent

Savagely the truth.

I guess if your joy is outputting a lot of stuff. It’s really satisfying to actually learn things and we know llms disrupt the learning process.

Yeah it’s all by design. I hate this framing around anything critical where we’re expected you tie ourselves into knots to protect the status quo. “What if we made it instructive” that will still cause problems and like that would ever happen in the first place.

Can you really know your enemy if your enemy doesn’t have an actual agenda besides maximizing user retention?

Connecting on a community like this (with at least the intent) of having actual human responses is a good first step. For the sorts of questions about what to do in life keep exploring why you’ve had bad human interactions and see how you could lower the chance of that happening. For the coding try accepting that very likely you’ll make mistakes or do things in a non optimal way for the first pass. Think of writing code like writing a rough draft don’t worry about big o etc. Focus on building an understanding and mentally model rather than producing an output (read: source code). AI gives you output and brain chooses lazy way to reach the goal.

Think of non AI code production like a woodworker that can read a piece of wood knows where the knots and the unexpected grain direction c changes are and uses that understanding to make something. Maybe what they set out to build wasn’t actually feasible. Compare to an ai it’s more like a factory it will make cuts right on knots etc. All is focus on output with the inputs at any cost.