> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?

Data centers and their side effects (higher electricity prices, etc) and job layoffs attributed to AI; plus a bunch of industry specific objections (like say, how it's currently destroying the educational system).

> Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it

Not sure what crowd you're running with. Myself and coworkers use AI and are generally positive about its effect on our productivity. But I don't think they'd say they 'enjoy' it, and we're probably the _best_ case. Who in the world 'enjoys' using AI?

▲

arecsu a day ago | parent | next [-]

I love using AI. Getting my crazy ideas turn into software has never been easier. I like to architect software, not the code itself. The code has always been the means to my ends. I also love learning complicated concepts, from academics, math, physics, to art, philosophy, religion. It's wonderful to translate knowledge that is already out there but hard to understand somehow, because you can ask about it over and over and over and in the way you understand about things. Like a professor who understands you and never gets tired about silly questions. I don't know, it's just amazing at so many things. Of course, it's also pretty important to know how to use it, and when. I would never use it to replace my speech when speaking to someone else. That's bad. I would not like other people to do that to me either. Otherwise, why would I want to talk with that somebody when I can just ask an AI instead. We can love human beings and AI, and be critic of both at the same time.

▲

72deluxe 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Have you ever wondered how ridiculous it would be to say you love cars and then not have a clue about how it works? As in, "I've built a wonderful car", but have no idea how the engine or any of the components work.

Replace "car" with "application" or "software", and that's what you're doing. Would you get in a car "built" by someone who knows nothing about cars?

	▲	munksbeer 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The person you're responding to didn't say they loved software though. They said they saw it as a tool to get interesting stuff done.
	▲	nylonstrung 19 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This doesn't sound like someone who is uninterested in understanding software though, everything they said talks about how they like being able to learn from it. They didn't say anything about making slop or replacing the need for knowledge

▲

UncleMeat 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you ever asked an expert in these areas to evaluate your knowledge? My experience is that people using ai to learn think they are learning but really aren’t.

▲

simonw a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I enjoy it. I have a small army of weird little golems that mostly do what I tell them to do. What's not fun about that?

The other day I asked one of them (running directly on my laptop) to "draw an svg of a circle" and it "thought" for 20 minutes and produced this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...

I'm still chuckling to myself about that two days later.

▲

jackling a day ago | parent [-]

> What's not fun about that?

Depends on the person, I never really had fun telling someone else what I wanted built or drawn. I've always enjoyed the process more than just the results, and having the results without the intellectual activity is boring.

For software, the increase usage of AI code makes my team move much faster, but our software isn't robust anymore and I fear that our longterm mission is being compromised by the endless slop. Favoring quick implementations that AI can make versus good implementations, and lazily relying on AI makes my teammates not develop a deep understanding of the work, which ultimately limits the solutions they can develop. YMMV.

Also, I don't understand what's funny about your image? Is it that it's bad?

▲

simonw a day ago | parent [-]

It's that I asked for an SVG of a circle and it created a beautiful gradient filled animated technical diagram. I wanted something closer to <svg><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40"/></svg>

Qwen 3.8 27B on xhigh is a delightfully weird over-achiever.

Here's another fun one: "Generate an SVG of a pelican eating caviar and drinking expensive wine in a tony SF restaurant" - it thought about that for almost an hour! SVG and thinking trace here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...

Aside from fun with over-engineered SVGs, I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.

	▲	jackling a day ago \| parent [-]
		> I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating. Yea that's why I started my comment with "it depends on the person", in response to you asking what's not fun about having AIs do what you tell them. For many, coercing a tool to do something you can likely do yourself better isn't ideal, and at least for me, is just inefficient use of time (in the long run) and a headache. It also zaps the fun out of any task since now you move from searching for a good solution using your priors, to now validating that the LLM has a solution that works, even if it's not optimal. The searching for a good solution is for some, the fun part, which is eliminated by agentic coding, since that search inherently relies on you writing code and seeing what works IMO. The coding is an essential part of the thinking here. An analogy would be doing a math problem by hand versus reading the solution in a textbook. I can give concrete examples if you'd like. For your SVG examples, I have used AI for a similar use case, the construction of 3D scenes for robotics via a text prompt and an asset catalog. I wish I could get the same richness as your SVG examples, the LLMs fail too hard on all 3D tasks given, even after spending a high amount of engineering effort on a suitable harness + tools. Also like your SVG example, it often doesn't give a realistic, or even nice output, and coercing it to do so, likely takes longer than just creating the image/3D scene yourself.