This was great. I think about this a lot and have for years now.

When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?”

Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question.

I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them for brute-forcing boring stuff. Like, hey we’re making this thing faster. Let’s measure all this stuff, and you come up with whatever I’ve missed to include in benchmarks. Make a benchmark harness for each approach we’ll try. Create tests to ensure none of the changes alter behaviour or outputs of the system. Make it pipe results into this database with this schema. Let’s try these approaches. Which other approaches could work? Keep slamming these benchmarks until statistically significant results appear.

The thing we’re speeding up is usually a single query in the armpit of an application that in prior years I never would have been able to address. But now I can. By doing this I can improve the user experience and scale back our resources and other stuff we like.

Am I missing out? I don’t know. I program less. I get a lot more done. My employer is very happy. My team expresses appreciating my work more than ever. It’s a stark contrast, actually. It feels weird.

I’m still not sure what the answer is. I do miss tinkering. Yet I suppose the point was never me tinkering. It was me having a job to perform for a specific purpose for my employers.

Did it take away a bit of what my life is, or did it change it? I’m still using my brain. I’m still thinking through problems. I’m still finding bugs and mentally tracing them to understand how to work through it with Claude. But the actual moving of bits? I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I used to.

I’m still very conflicted about it.

I’m so disturbed when I see friends and family using AI for ‘real’ stuff. Recipes, images, writing, etc.

Is programming ‘real stuff’ too, though?

I don't know if I would put recipes in the same 'real' stuff category as writing. I am sure celebrity cookbooks have been regurgitating the same recipes with slight modifications for decades now. What is the difference between buying and following Reese Witherspoon's cookbook and just asking an LLM? It is not like either is putting your apron on and mixing the ingredients.

To be honest, when working on personal projects with AI I feel like I've replaced some of the joy of tinkering with code with the joy of tinkering with models. They require different work, writing prompts, setting up guardrails, harnesses etc, and that is also pretty fun for me!

Did you use AI to write this ? Feels like you did.