I got into crypto in 2017 when I came across the phrase "money is a technology". That idea fascinated me. But fast forward several years later, and it's obvious that money might be a technology in the sense that it's a tool, but more importantly, money is a culture.
I'm not criticizing CEOs, only mentioning them because they're at the helm and the ones calling the shots at companies. But the psychosis has hit pretty much everyone, of all intelligence ranges.
Also, I'm genuinely excited about AI. It's absolutely incredible. Even with all the problems, I'm more invigorated about being a programmer than at almost any point in my career. You have to embrace the chaos.
It's not the same crowd. I know some genuinely extremely intelligent people (can't go into specifics) who have gotten bit by AI psychosis. It's been wild to see.
We're in a dangerous valley where AI is _just_ good enough to fool some otherwise very smart people. Similar to the old adage of "a little bit of information is a dangerous thing." Lots of CEOs got duped into thinking that model capabilities were far ahead of where they actually were. I'm actually not sure if we're going to get out of the valley without figuring out a surefire way to reliably evaluate these things.
The web has its own storied color, albeit a tragic one. Rebecca Purple is a named CSS color, which was added in tribute to Eric Meyer's daughter, who very sadly passed away at a young age. That shade was her favorite color.
I'd support it at the federal level. It's cruel towards people looking for work, and it costs them real time at a point in their lives when time is such a critical factor.
What will always be hard and useful is to observe people, find a problem they haven't solved, and then solve that problem for them. AI has not, and will not, make that easier or less useful.
It's not just for myself, but I'm primarily creating it for myself - it's a browser for designers. I work in code but I often want a figma-type interface to explore different ideas without having to branch or litter my codebase with a bunch of demo components/files.
Normal browsers have built-in dev tools - this has built-in design tools. so I can visit my app, open up a surrounding canvas, pull fragments into the canvas, do some design-ish stuff, and merge it back into code. All in the same UI. It was cool enough that I'm going to release it, but for now it's very useful for myself.
lol I'm more speaking to reliability than the quality of the interface. git and ffmpeg are not exactly known for the most intuitive API surface, but I don't think I've ever encountered a bug with them in my 17 years. That's a pretty extraordinary thing when you think about it.
I know I must be underthinking this, but I really don't know why native toolkits can't just implement some codegen thing that takes XML and produces the above.
I do agree with you though. It feels like the industry has steadily been getting worse, AI is just like pouring kerosine on the fire. I'm almost embarrassed to call myself a software engineer now.
On a small bright note, I've gotten AI to help me produce some of my best work over the last couple of months. It may enable sloppy behavior, but it doesn't require it. I have hope that serious work will win out in the end, and that sheer human effort is still the differentiator.
To be fair, "excited by the promise only to be disappointed by the reality of the implementation" describes ~95% of my experiences with all software over the last 20 years. In fact only a few exceptions really come to mind - git, treesitter, ffmpeg, and sqlite.
That's all true - I taught myself how to code from 2009-2012 so I remember what it was like. However, around that time there was also deep focus on architecture, an obsessive focus on rendering performance and page weight. Everyone could recite the loading sequence that HTML pages used, we knew how many requests could be downloaded in parallel, how to best bundle assets for the fastest time to render, etc. So it was a mix of both pain and frustration on one hand, and a pride in one's work on the other hand.
Both have been lost; good riddance the former, but I miss the latter.
https://matry.design https://github.com/danielvaughn