That's a feeling I've been also feeling for the last year or so. Turns out the means was what I cared about, and I didn't care about the ends that much. LLMs robbed me of that in a way I couldn't see coming.

I think that we as a society fail to see that the speed we built things was rarely the problem. The real shortage was in the ideas - having them, finding the motivation to act on them, sharing them, and the biggest driver was the desire of showing off, being told you are great and your idea was great.

I am afraid that by removing the ick to fix things, to challenge everything and being rewarded for that, we will end up with less innovation, not more. Why bother? Why do anything if everything is cheap, why start a new project only to be shrugged away as being yet another thing any machine could have done? Why show off when the merits are the machine's?

HN went from being a constant stream of Show HN to AI news after AI news. The most interesting projects AI have enabled are to run old stuff onto other things.

Rehashes of old ideas keep sprouting out of everywhere, keeping new ones at bay. I think we are probably entering a long winter and all that will be left is permutations of what we did before '23