Challenge Is Gone

I think you just need to push yourself to do harder problems. For me, I pushed pretty aggressively into the hardware space, building things as a hobby that I originally felt would be far too time-consuming. This is an area where AI can certainly help accelerate but asking it to make small changes can be an expensive (token wise) proposition, so it forces you think through all the critical decisions and research up-front, and let AI do the boring scut-work.

I do feel like I should be thankful to be alive right now though. I witnessed the evolution from Kirby on the Game Boy to Half Life 2 to VR to LLMs. The tools we use today were science fiction only a few years ago.

I just wish society was in a better state to make this tech a greater good instead of a tool for advertisement, warfare and wealth concentration. I feel a deep sense of loss because of this. 20 years ago I had no doubt that technological progress was an obviously good thing, that it would improve the lives of everyone. Do I still believe this? I'd like to, at least.

I was genuinely considering whether or not I still liked programming - the excitement and risk of technical failure had dropped off. Most failures were for other organizational and process and management reasons. I respect the value of executing those aspects well, but I have no interest in becoming fluent in solving that class of problems. It just bores me. I want to build big beautiful, complex, intricate machines.

The agentic tools are, for me, a step up into tackling broader projects I had put on the shelf as "not doable without investment". I can self-fund my ideas now. Things I anticipate would have taken about a decade or so to play around with and build out as a sole developer, I'm taking on as a sole developer.

But that said, I do appreciate that we can't be sure of what exactly this churn will produce. The other factors that go along with the technical achievement aren't too rosy.

Many people have not even experienced community these days. Imagine where you feel part of something bigger than yourself. A gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum.

We People grew being in that situation - we would hunt, farm, fix things, make things - better not just for ourselves but for our community. It became our nature, just as it has became the nature of sheep dogs to herd.

Imagine a sheep dog who lives a life with no sheep. They have all that built into their nature and never get to be that. That is you and so many other people. So there is your challenge.

For many problems, the LLMs look like they might be making progress, but once you zoom out far enough you realize it's just pushing the toothpaste around in the same tube with the cap still on. The mass of the overall system is not changing despite the appearance of localized progress.

If your primary source of identity was gatekeeping the Pantone colors of the various office furniture, then yes perhaps the challenge is now gone. But, if you were focused on mission and 'big picture' (what furniture and why), it's plausible that the challenge could actually increase in its intensity.

There's a challenge for you right there. Learn to spell or learn to live with mistakes.

It's not that I couldn't have. I wouldn't have.

Yes AI can solve very difficult problems without requiring you to understand enough about it.

This gives the impression that you can solve anything, create anything, and put it out there. And because this seems to be true, you feel less motivation to go and do it, because it’s so easily achievable. It seems AI is robbing your ability to differentiate yourself and push hard on a direction and build something that matters.

However, I have a feeling that is increasing over time. I believe that this is not true at all.

Even with AI, an enormous amount of energy needs to come from within one self, to truly create something meaningful that is used by other people. Just because AI can spit out code that solves a set of problems, it doesn’t mean it’s ready to be used and that it will turn out to be something people actually care and use.

If your only ambition was solve a hard problem, and the problem was purely technical, I agree you are in a bad spot, but then again this is not gone. People play single player videogames fully knowing they can finish the game and they can even hack if they wanted but they don’t, they still enjoy playing, it just means this is now perhaps a hobby rather than something you can profit from.

Creating a product however, remains difficult I believe. A product that people actually enjoy using and solves something. If anything the bar is higher, and it is very hard to differentiate. I think this is more challenging than before, not less.

So if you shift your ambition to be, I want to create something people actually enjoy and it’s useful, and I can survive the next few years and have a competitive advantage, I think this is incredibly difficult.

The main one I see is the question of how we can use an LLM as humans to produce something harder than the LLM can by itself.

I like to think of it with an analogy. Suppose I was granted the privilege of having a world renowned human expert as my personal assistant, but she had no initiative of her own. How could I collaborate with her?

I would definitely need to keep learning more to understand what she says. I would also need tools to augment my ability to follow along and she would need tools to bring knowledge down to my level of understanding.

One might argue humans are unnecessary in the above process, but I think that's just failing the challenge of keeping up. So I try

It is a failure of imagination to think that there is no longer much challenge. But I guess all humans have a problem with tunnel vision, to various extents.

I think that we as a society fail to see that the speed we built things was rarely the problem. The real shortage was in the ideas - having them, finding the motivation to act on them, sharing them, and the biggest driver was the desire of showing off, being told you are great and your idea was great.

I am afraid that by removing the ick to fix things, to challenge everything and being rewarded for that, we will end up with less innovation, not more. Why bother? Why do anything if everything is cheap, why start a new project only to be shrugged away as being yet another thing any machine could have done? Why show off when the merits are the machine's?

HN went from being a constant stream of Show HN to AI news after AI news. The most interesting projects AI have enabled are to run old stuff onto other things.

Rehashes of old ideas keep sprouting out of everywhere, keeping new ones at bay. I think we are probably entering a long winter and all that will be left is permutations of what we did before '23

When you pigeonhole yourself into only finding challenge in one field, you're bound to be disappointed eventually. While I do miss some of the challenge, these tools have given me more freedom to tackle difficult problems outside of software, both personally and professionally.

For most of my life the “main quest” was always obvious. I went to school, found my soul mate, got married, bought a house, had kids, paid off the mortgage, got yelled at by Howie Mandel, won the awards, achieved my career goals.

But now there’s no main quest. It’s just a whole wonderful, brilliantly rendered world of side quests for me to pick from. I’m spoiled with choice…

The thing is… main quests drive you, but you have to drive the side quests; they’re perfectly content to not get done. It’s an adjustment, and I’m optimistic that I’ll overcome it. But I’m currently trapped in the doldrums of figuring out what to do between now and when the credits roll.

LLMs make what was formerly hard trivial, that is true. But they cannot do everything with simple prompts, you must increase your ambition to what was formerly impossible. Try building a bigger game, more complicated software or hardware…what have you always wanted but written off as something only a multi-millionaire with a large team of domain experts could accomplish? Because you have one now.

Assuming you didn't use AI for more than spelling

Great. Practical nuclear fusion power, please.

Anyone who has translated a book, a literature one, knows it isn't something that is well done by AI.

I feel like possibility has arrived.

I can build anything I want.

Even so it’s still very challenging to build anything worthwhile.

Here's a challenge: see yourself from the outside.

Realize that however effective you are as a programmer now, you were once a hopeless beginner.

Then you must acknowledge that you are still a hopeless beginner, relative to the you that doesn't exist yet.

In the spirit of fellowship, I tell you:

    git gud

And as you continue to learn, you'll see this for yourself, but I guarantee to you now that AI opened paths to writing novel software which no one has noticed yet. Software that was possible before but perhaps annoying to build, etc. Software which perhaps will only ever be imagined by someone who learned exactly the things you have, in exactly the order you did.

Never make the mistake that AI knows how to do everything just because it knows how to do everything we've done so far.

And don't think of your work as "mining" engineering problems! Forget engineering problems. Find a human problem and think about it for an entire month.

I'm sorry, but I find this a bit silly. Either:

* your imagination is extremely limited (which is OK, no worries!), and the statement is true because of that, or

* your imagination is fine and the statement is just false, or

* your imagination is fine and the statement is true, in which case: what's stopping you? We all agree that there are engineering challenges, the solution to which would make the world a better place (or make you fabulously wealthy, whatever floats your boat), so get cracking if it's so easy now!

Which is it?