I got out of tech about 5 years ago, before AI really took off. I still do a lot of personal projects and now never use AI. I tried it a bit (only free plans) but noticed how much it caused me to no longer be able to think through a solution myself. I thought I was learning a lot from it but for some reason whatever I learned from it didn't stick. So now I'm no longer using it at all. I do realize that this is very specific to my situation of course.
I really do not get all of y'all claiming this causes you to "not be able to think".
I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying.
I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that was previously impossible without mastering other diciplines (CSS, design, etc).
With AI, I've built several video games, my own SRS software, my own productivity software, and a business making $5M ARR and growing 70% month on month.
I've now done more hardware projects in the past eight months than I have in the last ten years. I might even start doing physics and bio (I did my undergrad in biochem) if I can find the time.
I'm also back to making movies. I was a major hobbyist filmmaker before the pandemic. I've shot dozens of films. They're extremely logistically complex and take so much time, and I was never capable of working in the high fantasy or sci fi genres I wanted to. Seedance is scratching so many of my itches it isn't even funny. It's like a gift from the gods.
I'm working more now than ever before, and I'm turning those hours of writing pointless glue code or testing new libraries and frameworks into actual productive work. Getting real work done.
2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again.
tl;dr - I can still write in cursive, but it turns out I just don't need to as I write my movie.
I do not get you folks who claim this is bad. This is magical.
Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators.
I’m with you — I’m producing more and better art, with a deeper understanding of the art which comes from scale. My music is more innovative, my simulations are richer and more fun, I can wake up in the morning with a new idea and have a prototype in hours. It is magical.
Big difference is when you use a calculator or other tools, you still have to interpret and know what to enter.
With modern AI, you basically just ask for something and what used to be days worth of work magically appears, you didn't really think through a single thing when it comes to implementation, architecture etc unless you made a conscious effort to audit that.
We also generally still encourage students to learn how to do certain operations and what they mean without a calculator before letting them rely on it to make things quicker. If you never knew what a sin/cos was you'd never even know when to use those or why they even exist on a calculator.
AI is a step up where you literally don't have to know what those are, you could just take a picture and ask for the solution and it would do that all for you if you let it.
In reality modern AI is a massive test of willpower. You can completely let go of the reigns and it will happily do everything for you.
[−]claytongulick · 2026-08-30 Sun 16:36 UTC ·
link
> Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators.
Why do you think so many people prefer to listen to live music over an album playing on a jukebox?
Live music doesn't have the polish and perfection of a studio recording, it's much less efficient to have to manually play instruments than to just hit "play" on a song. So why bother?
I think it's because we're looking at things wrong all over the place.
Similar to live music, I definitely prefer to read code written by a real human. I can get in their head, understand how they were reasoning to solve a problem, even if there were problems with their reasoning.
When I hear all the breathless takes about AI "productivity" improvements, my brain just circles aback to the old saw about activity over achievement.
What are your outputs? What is activity and what is achievement?
A business person brags that AI is able to generate a report for them that used to require lots of manual work linking spreadsheets. OK.
What was the value of the report? What was the goal? I like to follow this all the way down-
- Widget sales report
Why?
- To inform inventory and production decisions, as well as marketing
Why?
- So that the company can make money? So that the founders can be proud of their product? So that the product can improve lives in some way?
Why?
- So that the people working can have improved lives, and/or more status in society
Why?
- So that collectively by competing with each other in structured ways, humans as a whole thrive and benefit
Etc...
OK. Where does AI fit into this? What has it taken away from the human experience, and how had it affected all of these goals?
The goal isn't code. It isn't even the product that the code makes - it's the reward signaling thay you get from cooperating and competing with other people.
When you short circuit your efforts at creation by using AI, it feels the same to me as saying you're putting on a live music show, but instead just hitting "play" on an album.
I believe you. I'm just telling my own personal experience. What works for you doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? But also: I'm purely doing things for my own pleasure now, so whatever I enjoy more is what I'm free to do. Again though, that's just me.
This isn't UGC. I know a lot of studios from my filmmaking and 30% of my customers are spending thousands of dollars a month. It's got really good word of mouth and 89% M3 retention.
There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft.
It's also completely open source (the desktop app and the server).
There's another variant of ArtCraft that works with other subscriptions (Runway, Higgs, OpenArt, Comfy, etc.) that I'm testing with some artists: https://artcraftx.ai
Artists are fine tuning their own workflows on top of my own source software and then sharing their variants of ArtCraft.
I'm building OpenSourceRouter.com (soon) that will be an open source OpenRouter/FAL/RunPod/Featherless fine tunes. It already powers ArtCraft and is 90% complete to launch. Maybe in the future compute will be fully portable and you can just login to services with compute.
I'm also building a collaborative space for AI artists to share workflows, refs, fine tunes, network, and collaboratively build. This side of the business is already here and growing and I haven't built the infra for it yet. It's currently in Discord and an assortment of other places.
I'm going to make ArtCraft work with local models too. Comfy is not comfortable, and an all-rust/native, heavily opinionated product with lots of love from filmmakers and artists can do a better job than node graphs IMO.
I really care about these tools and I'm doing all of this from a place of passion. I'm not a mercenary trying to get rich quick. I'm here for the mission of empowering artists (and I count myself - this is a tool for me.)
It's growing really fast and I'm talking to bigger and bigger folks. It's kind of wild.
Why do you (and lots of other people with your mindset) speak to other humans this way?
I post stuff I make on reddit and the teenagers (or grown men?) say things like, "your mother should have used a coat hanger if she knew you'd use AI". And it's almost a daily occurrence on social media.
I'm having a great time, and you don't have to join the club. Do whatever you want with your life. But stop talking to us like this.
I get that what I posted here is a critical refutation and not simply a neutral art or tech post about AI to a friendly audience. It invites critique and that's fine. But all the same, why do people go out of their way to frame it like this? To dunk on positive things and experiences people are having?
> But all the same, why do people go out of their way to frame it like this?
Because you (and your legion of likeminded folks on pseudosocial media) indeed sound like some washed-up, self-delusional salesman with a loaded gun to his head, desperately trying to land that sales pitch. And that's before we come to address all the usual cheap clichés, false equivalences, or if you wrote that slop yourself in the first place, etc.
Difference between taking your own notes and skimming someone else's.
I have found in the last year I "get more done" but I learn less. Whats even worse is if I burn though my token quota I am less likely(and less able) to "switch to manual". LLMs make an ocean of decisions and assumptions very quickly and if you don't slow it down very intentionally (and lose the promise of the AI providers are pitching) you will quickly not have a good idea of how systems work.
It’s funny, I’m the exact opposite. I’ve tackled projects at scales I could never have done before, and learned more than I would have.
My actual coding ability is probably lower, but I’ve learned so much about music theory and production, CAD, and statistics. All because my hobby projects can go so much further than before.
There was a well known phenomenon people called ‘tutorial hell’ where when learning to program you could understand all the code from tutorials, but when it came time to actually create your own solutions for stuff you got stuck. I think AI is basically enabling eternal tutorial hell, you never actually need to break out of it anymore.
I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying.
I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that was previously impossible without mastering other diciplines (CSS, design, etc).
With AI, I've built several video games, my own SRS software, my own productivity software, and a business making $5M ARR and growing 70% month on month.
I've now done more hardware projects in the past eight months than I have in the last ten years. I might even start doing physics and bio (I did my undergrad in biochem) if I can find the time.
I'm also back to making movies. I was a major hobbyist filmmaker before the pandemic. I've shot dozens of films. They're extremely logistically complex and take so much time, and I was never capable of working in the high fantasy or sci fi genres I wanted to. Seedance is scratching so many of my itches it isn't even funny. It's like a gift from the gods.
I'm working more now than ever before, and I'm turning those hours of writing pointless glue code or testing new libraries and frameworks into actual productive work. Getting real work done.
2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again.
tl;dr - I can still write in cursive, but it turns out I just don't need to as I write my movie.
I do not get you folks who claim this is bad. This is magical.
I’m with you — I’m producing more and better art, with a deeper understanding of the art which comes from scale. My music is more innovative, my simulations are richer and more fun, I can wake up in the morning with a new idea and have a prototype in hours. It is magical.
With modern AI, you basically just ask for something and what used to be days worth of work magically appears, you didn't really think through a single thing when it comes to implementation, architecture etc unless you made a conscious effort to audit that.
We also generally still encourage students to learn how to do certain operations and what they mean without a calculator before letting them rely on it to make things quicker. If you never knew what a sin/cos was you'd never even know when to use those or why they even exist on a calculator.
AI is a step up where you literally don't have to know what those are, you could just take a picture and ask for the solution and it would do that all for you if you let it.
In reality modern AI is a massive test of willpower. You can completely let go of the reigns and it will happily do everything for you.
Why do you think so many people prefer to listen to live music over an album playing on a jukebox?
Live music doesn't have the polish and perfection of a studio recording, it's much less efficient to have to manually play instruments than to just hit "play" on a song. So why bother?
I think it's because we're looking at things wrong all over the place.
Similar to live music, I definitely prefer to read code written by a real human. I can get in their head, understand how they were reasoning to solve a problem, even if there were problems with their reasoning.
When I hear all the breathless takes about AI "productivity" improvements, my brain just circles aback to the old saw about activity over achievement.
What are your outputs? What is activity and what is achievement?
A business person brags that AI is able to generate a report for them that used to require lots of manual work linking spreadsheets. OK.
What was the value of the report? What was the goal? I like to follow this all the way down-
- Widget sales report
Why?
- To inform inventory and production decisions, as well as marketing
Why?
- So that the company can make money? So that the founders can be proud of their product? So that the product can improve lives in some way?
Why?
- So that the people working can have improved lives, and/or more status in society
Why?
- So that collectively by competing with each other in structured ways, humans as a whole thrive and benefit
Etc...
OK. Where does AI fit into this? What has it taken away from the human experience, and how had it affected all of these goals?
The goal isn't code. It isn't even the product that the code makes - it's the reward signaling thay you get from cooperating and competing with other people.
When you short circuit your efforts at creation by using AI, it feels the same to me as saying you're putting on a live music show, but instead just hitting "play" on an album.
https://youtu.be/kzvQMdg66Go (Now with full animation control, not just blocking and posing.)
This isn't UGC. I know a lot of studios from my filmmaking and 30% of my customers are spending thousands of dollars a month. It's got really good word of mouth and 89% M3 retention.
There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft.
It's also completely open source (the desktop app and the server).
There's another variant of ArtCraft that works with other subscriptions (Runway, Higgs, OpenArt, Comfy, etc.) that I'm testing with some artists: https://artcraftx.ai
Artists are fine tuning their own workflows on top of my own source software and then sharing their variants of ArtCraft.
I'm building OpenSourceRouter.com (soon) that will be an open source OpenRouter/FAL/RunPod/Featherless fine tunes. It already powers ArtCraft and is 90% complete to launch. Maybe in the future compute will be fully portable and you can just login to services with compute.
I'm also building a collaborative space for AI artists to share workflows, refs, fine tunes, network, and collaboratively build. This side of the business is already here and growing and I haven't built the infra for it yet. It's currently in Discord and an assortment of other places.
I'm going to make ArtCraft work with local models too. Comfy is not comfortable, and an all-rust/native, heavily opinionated product with lots of love from filmmakers and artists can do a better job than node graphs IMO.
I really care about these tools and I'm doing all of this from a place of passion. I'm not a mercenary trying to get rich quick. I'm here for the mission of empowering artists (and I count myself - this is a tool for me.)
It's growing really fast and I'm talking to bigger and bigger folks. It's kind of wild.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500019
I post stuff I make on reddit and the teenagers (or grown men?) say things like, "your mother should have used a coat hanger if she knew you'd use AI". And it's almost a daily occurrence on social media.
I'm having a great time, and you don't have to join the club. Do whatever you want with your life. But stop talking to us like this.
I get that what I posted here is a critical refutation and not simply a neutral art or tech post about AI to a friendly audience. It invites critique and that's fine. But all the same, why do people go out of their way to frame it like this? To dunk on positive things and experiences people are having?
Because you (and your legion of likeminded folks on pseudosocial media) indeed sound like some washed-up, self-delusional salesman with a loaded gun to his head, desperately trying to land that sales pitch. And that's before we come to address all the usual cheap clichés, false equivalences, or if you wrote that slop yourself in the first place, etc.
I have found in the last year I "get more done" but I learn less. Whats even worse is if I burn though my token quota I am less likely(and less able) to "switch to manual". LLMs make an ocean of decisions and assumptions very quickly and if you don't slow it down very intentionally (and lose the promise of the AI providers are pitching) you will quickly not have a good idea of how systems work.
My actual coding ability is probably lower, but I’ve learned so much about music theory and production, CAD, and statistics. All because my hobby projects can go so much further than before.
OTOH, the output might stick?
Then the question becomes do you value knowledge for its own sake or for what it enables you to do? I don't have an answer.