Is Everyone Getting Stupid?
NyekiI joined /dev/null some weeks ago and the app itself is great. Shiny, new, modern. It was also the first contact with other developers I've had in quite a while regarding social networking. I usually saw what was trending on GitHub, most of it was AI for X, AI for Y, nothing useful and mostly just lots of slop (or stuff I just didn't care about).
Now, on /dev/null I see what developers seem to be posting. Obviously, it's a little subset of all developers worldwide, yet something that hits me is how they're so much less interesting than what I thought they would be. People posting engagement bait, people talking about how they use AI at their jobs. I don't have a job, I'm building a startup. I don't use agents, I don't have money to pay for them. I just don't care.
What strikes me the most is how these are the so-called "marketable skills." Wtf. I've been coding as my #1 hobby for years, since I was 11-12 and I'm 20 now. Where are the developers building the cool stuff? The hard stuff? Everything just smells to slop and marketing nowadays. Most? developers are writing less and less code by hand, I write 100% of my code by hand.
People compare AI to how higher-level languages took over lower-level languages (i.e. you write C, not assembly). I think it makes sense in a way, except that AI can write low level code too. I'm not really against using AI, in fact I use ChatGPT a lot. I'm more like against what people seem to be optimizing for. AI lowers the shipping bar, and that applies to shitty software too. People building stuff because they can, not because they care.
AI is clearly here to stay, one way or another. Eventually it'll take over more and more parts of our lives. When AI was starting out, I believed it wouldn't be able to take over humanity because humans don't want to be replaced. So what, once AI is doing everything we'll all just go play golf all day? Money not mattering is what billionaires like Elon Musk and Ram Altman like to say. They're clearly visionaires, yet I think they're trusting that people will just sit down and do nothing about it once they start getting replaced.
"Ouh but industrial revolution and shi" AI is not creating more jobs in other areas, be for real. It's just replacing more jobs in more areas. I just can't think people will sit down and watch AI take over their lives, nobody wants to live without a meaning and I doubt playing golf will fulfill lives.
Back to everyone being stupid, and taking into account it's the subset of people I see on /dev/null (who are likely on Twitter too), I want to see what the rocket science guys are building. Are they just getting replaced by AI? I want to be with them, at the top of them obviously. That's in part why I'm starting a company and not just going for the dayjob instead.
Maybe they just all care about stuff I don't care about, it seems to me like they're all still focused on AI for CRUD though. But, I also think that even when I don't care about a topic, there's usually one or two blog posts that are able to catch my attention. Why's there nothing too interesting lately? Maybe that's because the stuff I care about is hidden beneath the surface of everythin AI? AI but for X, Y with AI, Z for AI.
About engagement bait, nobody likes engagement bait, obviously. Well that's what I'd say, but people
engage with it, so... Point is that even stuff that's not meant to be engagement bait feels like
engagement bait? AI this, AI that. Again, don't think I'm against AI. I'm not. Where are all the
interesting things, though? The things that don't say "Made in China with AI" on the base?
My experience with cuck coding was good and bad at the same time. For context, I was struggling to make a good landing page for Duckity so I headed over to v0 to see what it could do for me. Shiny, gorgeous, techy website in a second with the most generic marketing copy I've ever seen. Those lines in the footer that AI loves to put that just give away the slop from miles away. Even better, Google refused to index it. Even better, leads bounced after checking it out by hand when they received my cold emails.
Yeah, I didn't know how to write good marketing copy back then. I'm still learning, yet after a few tries and some human help I was able to get something way, WAY more decent than what AI had done for me. Best part? I made it all by hand and doesn't smell to slop.
Now, that doesn't confirm nor prove wrong that AI is a silver bullet. People love to talk about the x10 engineer and the x100 engineer. Marketing, marketing, and more marketing. They're just doing x10 at producing slop I think. And it bothers me, because it feels like nobody is really interested in the hard parts of coding anymore. At least not interested in solving them by hand. I bet there's quite a few vibecoded OSes out there, and I bet most of those people don't know what VGA is.
I'm not even talking about what the title usually would infer. I disabled copilot because I want to think about stuff, not just click enter. When stuff breaks, you have zero clue where to start, and that's what bothers me about AI too. Whenever you just generate big chunks of code, I (and I bet more than one person out there) just tend to press enter and force push. It's ass, because I end up depending on AI, and that just won't take me anywhere good.
My other hypothesis is that this is just too much social media. I don't use Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, nor [insert Instagram but vibecoded here]. Maybe the guys who are actually trying to understand how things work are just not trying to make noise on SNS, which would make a lot of sense. For now, I'll go to keep working on my stuff. Thanks for listening!
P.S. I'd love to discuss this! If you came here from Hacker News, leave a comment if you have something to say.