Feeling: Deflated

adjective: brought low in spirit

When I discuss the state of AI coding with senior developers, they generally share two different feelings at the same time. Firstly, enthusiasm with what is possible - a little like the ai-mania that I talked about earlier - the excitement about being able to get more of what they want to do done faster, but also sadness that they can see a part of the job they enjoy going away.

I got a sense of that creating this blog.

Thinking around the problem of commenting, Claude suggested a choice between offloading to hackernews, or using the federated standard webmentions. I decided that we should try both, and that was my whole contribution to the project.

Normally, a little project to bridge hackernews front page across to webmention notifications would be a fun way to learn more about something I wasn’t really familiar with. I was looking forward to getting stuck into it, but of course, the idea cropped up as part of this blog, so I started by giving it to claude.

5 minutes later, it was deployed and running. At least I think it was, Claude hadn’t bothered giving me a UI to view or test it. I assumed that it wasn’t working properly, so I insisted Claude add a bunch of UI elements and a log so I could see what was going on, and once it did, as far as I can tell, it is in fact working properly and sending webmentions for hackernews front page stories.

The whole experience left me feeling a bit deflated. I’m used to choosing a project I know will teach me something I want to learn, then pursuing the project outcome, trusting that the learning will happen on the way. That used to work, but if you’re using AI to chase the outcome, it no longer does.