Is anyone else losing their motivation to nerd out and tinker because of AI?

JohnFen

Personally, no. The existence of genAI has zero impact on that for me. It's simple to ignore it entirely.

uberman

The opposite is true for me. I have always wanted to try Godot as a platform and AI is helping me make that happen.

coldtea

People will go "no, I nerd out and tinker more than ever" where by "nerd out and tinker", and what they mean is "I prompt the AI, and it does the tinkering for me". I say the question isn't if you use AI to build you something, but if you nerd out and tinker yourself.

Festro

Opposite, AI has let me delve into resources that were hard to find, compare and confirm approaches to problems, and make progress on dozens more projects that I'd had sitting around. I now have Home Assistant established at home. LibreElec for a home media server. Time lapse camera for home mushroom growing. Wine steeping projects. And much more.

lucfranken

Getting really deep into some technical thing becomes way less. Most of it is solved by a prompt. On the other hand there are new techniques like keeping the agents on track and imagining about which things now became possible. But the real tinkering: In real life with real physical work.

throwaway29303

No. Quite the opposite.

softwaredoug

Absolutely not. I have way more hard problems that engage me then ever. I do both human and AI coding. The former more to learn and mold my mind around a problem. The latter when I feel I am ready to delegate to a junior dev. I think of AI coding like how I’ve operated as a principal engineer at a company. It works well when you study the problem well enough to know precisely what you want. That often requires actual hands on technical work IMO. The coding isn’t for the machine, its not even to ship, it’s to help me think. Then I have a basis to really understand and care about the details. I can micromanage agents to do what’s expected at this point.

mikert89

its the opposite, i can build far more and get stuck much less

jtap

I'm tinkering much more because I have an easy way to enter into a new domain and apply what I know to that domain. I can also get unstuck a bit more quickly as I go deeper. Before it was reading textbooks, this turned into searching the web, now I have a minion who can go write me a summary. Is the minion perfect? No, but more often it is.

Nata_Elisym

no, we go along together

setnone

no way, the time to tinker is now

ahmedhossamdev

Opposite for me. I'm reading & understanding more because I know most people will depend on it 100% without understanding. That gap feels like leverage.

Aozora7

No. Before AI, I have never wrote any code outside of work because nothing I could do in a reasonable time would be worth the effort. With AI, if there's software I wish existed, I can make it happen without making it an unpaid second job.

jryan49

Either I use GenAI when I feel like it, or I don't, so no.

krapp

No. Honestly AI drives me to nerd out and tinker even more just to spite the homogenization and dehumanization of it all. If we're entering a world in which doing anything but blindly consuming whatever pablum the machine feeds us is seen as foolish then I guess I'll be a fool.

schmudde

I've always had more projects than I do time. And it's easy for me to be selective about where I might use an LLM. So no changes here.

sorbalda

So, After 1 year of computational ph.d., I really pushed a lot the AI models. But honesty, also if they can be really good, I think that it does not really speedup a lot in long term a junior. You cannot really present non-validated results, and the validation of the huge amount of unorganized things that they generate is really stressing. So yes, for a while I was losing motivation, because I felt like I had to produce more but I could really follow that productivity. To really get motivation, u need to spend the correct amount of time of understand and make your hand dirty when it is necessary. I noticed that if I try before by myself, I understand what I am doing, and after I just optimize the code using an LMM, it is way more motivating