Imagine you need to write a long piece of text that requires you to think things through, gather information, and analyze it. Then you have to write the text itself, proofread it, correct any errors, and refine the wording. Let’s say you spend 10 hours on this task. Now
Engineering was always soulful, it’s modern industry and capitalism that made things bland, corporate and 100% utilitarian. People in the past went out of their wat to carve intricate designs onto their walls, bridges and streetlights, because they still believed in giving boring engineering projects a soul. It doesn’t have to be all soulless and bland.
The only person mentioning his use of AI also mentioned using it to write code for work, that’s just what it takes to put food on the table. That’s exactly what companies want, but it doesn’t have to be what you want.
Your own passion projects don’t need to care about “time to market” or “generating value”, go ahead and write code the way you want. Write it all in recursion, because you don’t need to scale to millions of customers, only yourself. Write your next project in Haskell, because it’s cool and your tech lead isn’t here to enforce that you use python exclusively.
To be clear, I’m not saying that the technology resulting from a software project should lack soul. It’s obviously a great thing when the authors of an application put a lot of care into designing its UX and operational efficiency; this is an art that LLMs do poorly today. But that is pretty much orthogonal from how the code reads. There is incredible, well-designed software out there which reads as totally boring, and that’s generally considered a good thing.
Also I’m not claiming that it is easy to do that; crafting boring code that still functions as intended is quite difficult. I’ve never seen an LLM do this without lots of hand-holding. The human touch is essential, but that doesn’t imply that a person using an LLM suddenly has stunted vision and lack of aesthetic.