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’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.