Posts tagged with "wisdom"

Responding to Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

Questions similar to this have been brought up previously, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. One point he mentioned sparked a thought I had:

The steering and judgment I apply to AI outputs is invisible. Nobody sees which suggestions I rejected, how I refined the prompts, or what decisions I made. So all credit flows to the AI by default.

Invisibility of effort is not new. People do not immediately arrive at an answer. This is true across domains. This is similar to the term “overnight success”. It may be the case something unexpectedly takes off, but all the work it took to get to the state where it could take off is forgotten.

When I write code I spend a lot of my time reworking it, massaging it, expressing it well. I may have gotten to a working solution quickly but it took much longer to get to a final solution. All of this effort is not seen by others, nor do I receive “credit”. Perhaps that is why the author does not recognize this similarity in other people’s end product, the hard work to get it to this state is not immediately obvious.

AI has changed where we receive satisfaction. The invisibility of the effort has always been true, but that doesn’t preclude satisfaction of the process and end result.