People will go "no, I nerd out and tinker more than ever" where by "nerd out and tinker", and what they mean is "I prompt the AI, and it does the tinkering for me".
I say the question isn't if you use AI to build you something, but if you nerd out and tinker yourself.
Opposite, AI has let me delve into resources that were hard to find, compare and confirm approaches to problems, and make progress on dozens more projects that I'd had sitting around.
I now have Home Assistant established at home. LibreElec for a home media server. Time lapse camera for home mushroom growing. Wine steeping projects. And much more.
I have way more hard problems that engage me then ever.
I do both human and AI coding. The former more to learn and mold my mind around a problem. The latter when I feel I am ready to delegate to a junior dev.
I think of AI coding like how I’ve operated as a principal engineer at a company. It works well when you study the problem well enough to know precisely what you want. That often requires actual hands on technical work IMO. The coding isn’t for the machine, its not even to ship, it’s to help me think. Then I have a basis to really understand and care about the details. I can micromanage agents to do what’s expected at this point.
Personally, no. The existence of genAI has zero impact on that for me. It's simple to ignore it entirely.
this; I don't like it so I simply don't use it.
The opposite is true for me. I have always wanted to try Godot as a platform and AI is helping me make that happen.
People will go "no, I nerd out and tinker more than ever" where by "nerd out and tinker", and what they mean is "I prompt the AI, and it does the tinkering for me".
I say the question isn't if you use AI to build you something, but if you nerd out and tinker yourself.
I'd further say it's not a TRUE Scottish tinkering unless you're hand writing machine code yourself and feeding it via punch cards.
"I asked somebody else to do this hobby project for me" is not the same as "I tinkered" whether that somebody else is a person or AI.
Same how you're not a musician just because you had Suno create something.
So, no, sticking to the actual meaning of a thing is not true scotsman fallacy.
Opposite, AI has let me delve into resources that were hard to find, compare and confirm approaches to problems, and make progress on dozens more projects that I'd had sitting around.
I now have Home Assistant established at home. LibreElec for a home media server. Time lapse camera for home mushroom growing. Wine steeping projects. And much more.
Getting really deep into some technical thing becomes way less. Most of it is solved by a prompt.
On the other hand there are new techniques like keeping the agents on track and imagining about which things now became possible.
But the real tinkering: In real life with real physical work.
No. Quite the opposite.
Absolutely not.
I have way more hard problems that engage me then ever.
I do both human and AI coding. The former more to learn and mold my mind around a problem. The latter when I feel I am ready to delegate to a junior dev.
I think of AI coding like how I’ve operated as a principal engineer at a company. It works well when you study the problem well enough to know precisely what you want. That often requires actual hands on technical work IMO. The coding isn’t for the machine, its not even to ship, it’s to help me think. Then I have a basis to really understand and care about the details. I can micromanage agents to do what’s expected at this point.