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I’m Done Using AI. “It made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software.” [brettcodes.com]

I am very sympathetic to the feelings he's expressing. As a lifetime programmer, I know exactly what he's feeling. But for me, coding has always been a means to an end. I want to build a game or make an app or have a blog. As a coder, I could implement these things better/faster than others…

If your "end" is just for you, cool. But if it is for other people to use/enjoy you need to know that we can tell when something was created with passion and when something was created simply to exist and we overwhelming want the former.

The discourse is strained by making it a black-and-white purity test. I’ve written games from assembly language putting bytes in memory to rasterizing textured triangles to OpenGL to Unity to Unreal. Which one of those crossed the imaginary line of “passion” vs “simply to exist”?

Here's the thing. We can't know you or any other dev, so we have to judge you based on what we know, and what we know is genAI is used *overwhelmingly* by slop-peddling turds just trying to scam a buck, so if you're using it, you get lumped in with them out of necessity.

No, I get lumped in with them out of critical laziness. I could trivially knock out slop right now using Unity and stock art. It’s still slop, whether or not I tick the “uses ai” box. Not because of the tools used (or not used), but because of the care taken and the results produced.