We got lost in AI

I am done

Okay, this is a different kind of post. In 2022 when ChatGPT was first released to the public I was really excited. I told my friends this technology would change the world similar to how the steam engine changed the world. I felt like a prophet, but in hindsight that was probably not that difficult. But somehow we as humanity took a wrong turn. Instead of helping us at our creative work and using AI as a tool, people and companies use it to replace all human creativity. Myself included. But I don’t want this anymore and it stops now.

I miss the pre-AI days

In the age before AI, solving a difficult problem could be a real challenge, sometimes annoying and took a lot of time. But now that Claude Code can finish a project in a day or two it becomes obvious to me that it wasn’t always about finishing a project but more about enjoying the journey. AI takes that completely away. Sure, even with AI, if you want the finished project to be usable you need to invest a lot of time in the planning of the architecture and the prompts. But it is not the same. While vibe coding you never get to know your code base the way you did while doing it the regular way. While working on a project I could navigate the codebase blind. I knew how everything worked and where everything was located. In a vibe coded project not so much.

The problem is not AI itself

It’s the hype around “Agentic”-AI. In the beginning I used AI as a tool. To help me when I got stuck for a long time or to do the tedious parts which wasn’t fun. That was a great time. AI was useful but not yet that good to do all the work for you. I remember the first time I tried Copilot in VS Code. It started with autocomplete in the editor, which even back then I found to be more annoying than useful, and later the agent mode. It was like watching magic. The code it could take hours to write myself just appeared and most of the time just worked.

Wow.

Except I never actually read the code. The only criteria I had was if the code works or not. Now that I decided to quit vibe coding I started to look closer at the results and I was surprised how bad it could get. Sometimes it’s fine but most of the times it’s a burning pile of trash.

The good ol’ days

While reading this back after I wrote it, I feel like I sound really old. The “back in the days everything was better” kind. I never thought it would come to this. I am now learning that my old life motto “new is always better” does not always apply. The way that everyone is now using AI is terrifying. Not everyone is a programmer, or an artist, or a writer. But with AI everyone now thinks they are. This needs to stop. This development kills our individuality and as a result everything starts to look the same, read the same, sound the same.

Does this mean I will stop using AI?

Okay look. AI has its legitimate place and use cases. It should be used again as a tool for embracing your own creativity again. And that is what I want to do again. I want to do the creative part again: the coding, writing these blog posts, the research for learning a new skill. I want to use AI to assist me with these things. Help me find a bug I am struggling to fix, review my finished article I wrote myself, guiding me while learning. It should serve me, not the other way around.

Okay rant is over.

But do you want to know what the worst part is: even though I recognized the importance from day one, I didn’t buy any NVIDIA stock. fml