“I'm less interested in what can be built with five minutes of effort and more interested in what can be built with five years of effort” (source).
The half-life of these creations is laughable.
Pressure to prove we're ahead has led us to celebrate mediocre-at-best toy prototypes. Prototypes of things we've been building far better ourselves for decades. It’s as if we’re on a skill abandonment speedrun, racing to see who can be the first to obliterate their hard-earned patience, skill, and experience in favor of micromanaging an intern that types too fast, too much, and too poorly.
It's like we don't like programming anymore. Thinking makes our head hurt. Commitment to the craft is for the old. We're throwing what was once our hobby under the bus just to desperately join some sort of blue collar martyrdom. Programming can't be fun, because were there be fun parts of programming to delegate, why wouldn't we be doing them in the first place? Or is it that the cool kids never liked programming at all, and we’re just witnessing the latest wave of grifters, descendants of the same people who bragged about getting rich on crypto a decade ago?
Gaslighting is sometimes necessary. It’s a form of survival. Can we stop for a second and ask ourselves what any of this is even about? Why are we doing this? What is all this garbage? Everybody is selling shovels, but nobody is digging. Deep down, we all know there’s nothing to dig for but dirt.
Regurgitation can't be a productive form of creation. Churning out mass-produced toy examples of solutions to a no-problem leads nowhere. We’re "building" based on the constraints of half-assed AI tools, not on the constraints of real problems that drive the inner engineer in us.