Article URL: https://beej.us/blog/data/ai-making/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008440 Points: 101 # Comments: 34

TLDR: I gain a lot of fulfillment by making things. I don't consider things built by others at my request to be made by me, and are therefore much less fulfilling. And then I feel sad. This article starts strong and then heads off into the weeds. There have been a lot of pieces written about what I'll call "the AI dev schism" And I think there's a lot of truth to those: We'll just grant those as being correct for various developers. But there's something else that troubles me. I'm going to use "AI" to mean "Generative AI and LLMs" in this essay. Sorry, veterans of so many AI winters. Before we begin, I'd like to share with you a bit of my latest sci-fi novel. Some of you might unaware that, in addition to Beej's Guides, I also write science fiction. Kael pressed his back against the shattered bulkhead, plasma scoring the air centimeters from his face. The Vorrkai assault drones had anticipated their route through the lower decks and now Rin was bleeding through her jacket sleeve and old Maret couldn't stop coughing from the vented coolant still hazing the corridor. Kael counted the pulse-intervals between shots. Three seconds. Maybe four. That was all the universe was offering him. Then he saw it: the maintenance shaft behind the collapsed generator housing, its grate blown half-open by the same explosion that had caved in their original exit. It was tight. It was ugly. It ran directly over the Vorrkai's forward position, which was either the most dangerous path imaginable or the last one they'd ever think to watch. Kael grabbed Maret's collar and pointed without a word. The old man's eyes went wide, then hard. He nodded. Rin was already moving. Kael came last, returning fire blind around the bulkhead corner, not to hit anything, just to make noise, and to give the drones something thermal to track while his people scrambled into the dark. A bolt caught the generator housing and the whole structure groaned, raining sparks down into the shaft on top of them. He hauled himself in, knees burning on the torn metal, and pulled the grate closed behind him with a sound he was certain every Vorrkai unit on the deck had heard. In the black ahead, Rin's hand found his wrist. Move, her grip said. Now. And so they did.