Calling something “the good old days” as someone who has barely made it out of his teens is a bit weird, but here I am doing it anyway.
After stumbling over yet another AI video, I started feeling a bit sick. Shoutout to ThePrimeagen at this point, his content is great and partially the reason I’m writing this post in the first place.
I wrote about this before
In September of last year, I wrote a post about how I use AI to learn. In it, I talked about how to actually use AI as a tool to learn from, rather than vibe coding your way through every task. I still feel like I’ve held true to that, but lately I find myself missing how life was before AI.
I miss spending hours digging through the internet trying to find a solution to some magical edge case that apparently no other human being had ever stumbled upon. AI has reached a point where most of that is obsolete. You can find a solution to your problem in seconds. It’s a huge time saver and yet, I miss it. I miss getting disgustingly educated on one tiny problem and being proud of the solution I came up with at the end of it.
The journey, not the destination
What made me fall in love with computer science was the challenge. The abstract thinking. Solving puzzles. AI has made all of that easier, more accessible and, to put it plainly, less fun.
Imagine going to an escape room and being handed a button that skips you to the next room. Imagine a Rubik’s cube that solved itself. Imagine clicking past the end of a video game. You’d reach the goal, and you’d reach it fast, but that was never the point. The fun is the journey, the process of getting there, not the moment you arrive. It’s not the same when someone gifts you a sports car as it is when you earn one yourself.
Looking forward
This is the future. I’m open to it, and in some ways I’m excited for what it brings. But some days, I’d wish AI had never become a thing.