I recently read We mourn our craft and it resonates for me. It does more than that actually. I think it’s normal to feel grief and emotions like mourning for something you’ve worked so passionately hard to obtain, becoming so easily accessible and reproducible for others. I don’t hate AI, I am actually very productive with it and I can do more than ever. However, I do grief. But things can co-exist.

Yes, there is a whole new world to explore with LLM/AI tech, but it’s different than the other changes over the past 25 years i’ve been around. And yes, we’ll find a way, but it’s also good to just actually feel it for a minute and understand its nuances.

It’s not hype, its actual value for even the most seasoned people. I don’t even want to put the word hype here to taint it. There is a huge disparity on opinions how valuable it is, but I think most of it boils down to effort put in and model selection. But back to my point.

I went to libraries to get books on programming because the internet wasn’t commonplace yet. I had to painstakingly type in every word in an Amiga to make a ball bounce. Later I started recording tapes from radio stations where they broadcasted games.

I was there when the internet came and people thought it was a fad. Built dialup systems with RAS and Asterisk. Built up lots and lots of knowledge by doing many freelance gigs for big, medium, and small companies.

I didn’t mind that some projects took very hard work with many failures along the path; all of it was learning anyway and that was valuable. The craft was expensive to learn in terms of time, but that knowledge was worth it and well earned.

And now, something ephemeral like knowledge, something that I held closely like an armour for all my life, has become so easily reproduced. Of course it’s still a matter of how one applies it all, but still. Being able to ask it in whatever form you want, in any language you want, is step one. Having the entire corpus at your disposal is insane. You just need to ask, filter, and be diligent.

And I would even argue it’s harder to make a difference now. One simply can’t train a model themselves with just pure coding. You need tons of data, truckloads of money to train. Where you could sit down and build a groundbreaking product alone becomes much harder now in the age of AI.

When I fully understood the impact of IA, I took a year of to travel, sail and think a little.