I was reluctant at first, but now I’ve made the inevitable compulsory mental moves down the programmer’s path with AI. A path we’re all headed down at varying speeds.
“I guess I gotta try this out” to “Hey this is actually pretty amazing” to “Dammit, go faster Claude!”
But I’m unsettled—in a way I haven’t been since building anything on the internet for the past 27 years. Not about all the stuff we’re all unsettled about—our jobs, the planet, mankind. I guess I’m worried about that too.
The unsettledness I’m talking about here is that feeling that I’m not actually making a thing. Producing feels a little empty, a little hollow. Even if this shiny thing that’s sitting on my screen didn’t exist until I willed it to exist.
I think I knew this about myself already—what satisfies me is the feeling of making the thing, not so much the thing itself. This difference, until present time, never revealed itself because you once had to make a thing in order for it to exist.
The two were one and the same.
Granted, we’ve produced shortcuts forever. Paper. The printing press. The Model T. Computers. Languages. Frameworks. Code generators. All this stuff sits on top of all the other stuff so that we can make things faster and more robustly.
But at no point in my career did I feel like I wasn’t making the thing. As each successive improvement in my toolset made delivering the end product better, I still felt like I was doing the making. In fact it made the feeling-of-making even better.
It’s not a quantifiable feeling. If you love creating things you know what that feeling is.
The quandary is this: The road ahead for AI potentially inevitably leads to a place where the less I feel like I’m making, the better the piece. It’s not too far from the idea of great leaders of teams being hands-off. Just let the team do the work and get out of the way. The team is AI now.
And this is perhaps why I’ve never liked being the leader. I like the making bit a bit too much. It’s the part that gives me purpose. Happiness.
So, for now, the trick is to find that builder’s path that leans on AI as much as it makes me better at producing, without losing the feeling of making.
In this new world, making can quickly give way to directing. Directing to merely correcting. Correcting to just choosing. And choosing from a few great options AI gives you from a prompt feels so so far away from the feeling of making. At least right now it does.
I’m sure the tightrope will inevitably gain more slack. The justification for what still “feels like making” to me will probably change—as the quality of the outputs keep getting so irresistibly better, and as the luxury, as all luxuries do, becomes dependence.
And this may be the shape a healthy relationship between myself and AI takes. You, Claude or whomever, can take every task from me so long as you make me feel like I’m still making things.
But please do it faster.
This is my philosophical prompt.