I just want enough money to retire and write interesting open source software, but doing that in my 20s made me poor, so since then I am trying to speed run retirement so I can go back to it.

Sadly, while I find AI effective, I also find it's removed the craft and personal reward I get from open source. So I will instead grow potatoes.

I'm coming full circle on the AI thing, it's almost entirely useless at creating a crafted result, so counterintuitively it places a greater premium on craft just at a time the industry as a whole are running in the opposite direction. There are some pieces of software I've thought of building now that I would not have considered a worthwhile pursuit a few years ago, solely due to this idea that a crafted result may have an increasingly inherent value in its own right

Even if machines can be made to produce compact, well thought out and beautiful, the interaction pattern almost inevitably ensures the "developer" produces something that is neither compact, well thought out or beautiful