Last "job" was a startup with two other people and it was so great having others to bounce ideas off of and share the ups and downs. Building something together is a fundamental human joy IMO. We sold that and I've been working solo for the last 4 years.
It's lonely, and these have helped me.
- Making a point to physically get out of the house and ideally meet up with someone for a coffee or lunch or something.
- Being part of an active group chat.
- Podcasts
- Working out of a library or bustling cafe, just physically being around other people.
- Working out and maintaining a good wake/sleep cycle.
I also have some great hobbies (flying, scuba, rock climbing) with great communities that keep me socialized.
For anyone about to quit their job and try the solo dev thing, I always say mental well being has to be a "remembered priority". You're never going to have work/life balance like you did at an office job and the first few years are incredibly tough, so you need to plan for that. Marathon, not a race etc etc.
I think we'll start to see AI as any other tool that can atrophy your natural faculties. You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither, but a wheeled vehicle for going longer distances is a genuinely useful tool.
Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.
> Reaching for AI as a _substitute_ for thinking is bad, but reaching for it as a tool to assist thinking is good; you just need to be honest about whether it's your brain in the driver's seat or the chat bot.
I think this is generally true, but human nature being what it is, the vast majority of people will use AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool to assist thinking. You can already see this from casual observation of today's AI users.
As I've grown older, I've noticed that more often than not, when someone says something to effect of, "Thing X can cause problems, but is great if used properly", you can be almost 100% certain that Thing X is going to cause very large problems and practically no one is going to use it correctly.
Unfortunately, "X is just a tool and is super useful when used properly, all things are both bad in excess and good in moderation, what you gonna do?" is exactly the type of conclusion that a chat bot is likely to reach. Doesn't really say anything, appears to express sophistication and wisdom by being more "nuanced" than an actual position, demands nothing of your audience, not likely to get downvotes on social media, etc.
I don't think the "tool weakening" discourse is strong enough: it overlooks the aversarial nature of the modern internet. There are humans actively intending to weaken you for various reasons, either to sell you stuff or to weaken you ideologically by making you hate other humans such as in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848215
Yes, IMO this is going to start becoming visible sooner rather than later. College students that defer to ChatGPT to form arguments for them are going to graduate, sit for an in-person job interview and discover they haven't had to think fast, with their own brain, in years. It won't be pretty.
But who is going to crack first? Will job applicants somehow remove their borg implants and learn to think on their own? Or will businesses give in and admit that nobody can think for themselves anymore, allowing applicants to use ChatGPT during their interviews (knowing that they're probably going to need to use it on the job, too).
Steve Jobs "bicycle for the mind" analogy is more potent than I initially thought.
When got past the bicycle phase where we augment our body with technology but still leave room for our body to improve. We got into the automobile phase where only the goal matter and the body is not participating (and improving) anymore.
(well, except maybe for F1 which are bona fide athlete, but your average driver in a traffic jam is most certainly not a F1 driver)
> You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither
Although it's not to the same degree of atrophy, I've been thinking of cars the same way. They're too easy to use once you have them, just press the pedal, so you stop walking and everything becomes a matter of driving distance, which makes it acceptable to distribute commercial activity in stupid little pockets of car destinations and avenues separated from each other by noise, pollution, and danger. People may not physically atrophy to the point of having no leg muscles, but their tolerance for walking a km becomes much more strained and their appreciation for investment in public transport lessens. They don't see or speak to people as much because they're always in their portable silo. You burn less calories, it's easier to gain weight, and people discount the value in having a gym within walking distance.
It's tough to reconcile it with being a functional tool, because although I could conceivably use it as one and buy one, I know that it can become an addiction.
Sure thing, sometimes it's fun! I suppose that's because I'm a thrillseeker. Let's see how fast it gets up to is a test. That wouldn't be the case if I were driving.
>You can use a wheelchair to get everywhere, but your leg muscles will start to wither
I don't know if they still exists but there was a (Dutch, I think) company that makes non-electric lifts and tools for elderly people at home that require muscle effort from the people using them. Purely augmentative tools that don't work without input.
And that is how it needs to be. Framing this as choice is already wrong. Any tool that is agnostic or conducive to forfeiting agency will be used in wrong ways. It's not enough to make the healthy part optional, your brain will not be in the driver seat given how human beings work.
People in Japan are slim with no spending while people in the US remain obese while spending billions exactly because to the Japanese this isn't a choice, it's one the environment makes for them. If you rely on people "keeping themselves honest" you've already lost.
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them."
> This discourse is as old as humanity. Every tool makes us stronger but also paradoxically weaker.
Of course that statement is true for every tool, but what's missing from the discussion is whether the trade off is worth it. Even truly terrible things have benefits. Smoking cigarettes makes it easier to maintain a healthy weight, this is well documented. Smoking has also been shown to reduce anxiety in some people. The negative consequences that cigarettes introduce, however, are so horrific that no one in their right mind would recommend that someone take up smoking, even if there are some demonstrable benefits to it.
I do not believe generative AI has any benefits whatsoever! If it does, I have yet to discover them. It may be a benefit to everyone here which is great, but i would say that it's better to spare it.
Lol I refuse to use it most of the time. If I want to test it, I do. I probably shouldn't do this, because it's keeping all data! It's good for some casual fun sometimes, I usually navigate away after I'm finished though.
Curious if we could test/compare (popluation-level) memory skills before/after writing was introduced to the population.
I want to say "I remember things better when I write them down", and because I think I'm a smart person I think my memory is good.
I don't know how well I'd remember things if I'd spent a large portion of my life building memorization skills. Maybe I could be 100x better at memory if I exercised it more?
You could theoretically do it with uncontacted tribes that don't practice writing, but in practice it'd be very very hard to establish a scenario to administer such a test, especially ethically.
Even then it would be a bad study because you'd have an extremely narrow biased sample with a very specific culture. It'd be impossible to separate out cultural or genetic differences.
there seems to be a parallel with the industrial revolution - being fit and having muscles used to be the norm when everyone worked the fields all day. but now that grocery stores and sedentary jobs have made exercise optional. so choosing to pursue fitness signals to others that one is disciplined, takes pride in their appearance, etc.
i can see the next couple generations of AI agents causing the same effect on reading, critical thinking, and intelligence in general. thinking is no longer necessary with AI agents, so maybe cultivating one's ability to think will become optional/personal pursuits which send similar signals.
I noticed this in myself and had a pang of disgust at myself. I used to write almost daily, but with the baby we've had there hasn't been time. So recently when I was thinking of getting back on it, I went testing several writing helpers that are LLM-powered. I think it took me a few days to realise I was only doing it because it's easier and “everyone is doing it”. Like, I write for pleasure, why the hell do I need to automate part of the process?
Design is one of those things that succeeds or fails in subtlety and both are difficult to quantify and back propagate through any sort of process, let alone training a model. The same way we figured out that the microwave can make approximations to good food quickly, so too shall we see that AI can do the same with tasks that rely heavily on a connection to people's aesthetics.
I've been using AI like this as well. The code-complete / 'randomly pop up a block of code while typing' feature was cool for a bit but soon became annoying. I just use it to generate a block of boilerplate code or to ask it questions, I do 90% of the 'typing the code' bit myself, but that's not where most programmers time is spent.
i'm not sure when you tried it, but if you've had copilot disabled it might be worth giving it another go. in my totally anecdotal experience, over the last few months it's gotten significantly better at shutting up when it can't provide anything useful.
I've read it, it's quite good and full of citations. I've seen a number of studies since it came out that support it as well.
If you like that, also check out "This is Your Brain on Food" which overlaps with much of the content there, but with a bit more of a focus on the gut brain connection.
Other than putting screen timers on all my apps, I've found that physically leaving my phone in other rooms to be helpful. Also recognizing it as a problem and acknowledging "Agh, I'm doing it again" when I get caught in a doom scroll hole at least puts some counterweight to the problem.
I also keep my laptop by my couch so I reach for it vs my phone. I hate typing on my phone so I end up just clicking on a dopamine drip app rather than actual reading / work which I tend to do more readily on a laptop or desktop.
It is a behavioural problem at the end of the day. Which means it will take discipline and accepting some feelings of discomfort up front to change for the long term.
There seems to be an army of people on Twitter making $100k MRR from AI Tinder photo enhancer apps and they have a course to sell you.
This is the same brand of person that was excited to get rich off NFTs and has now just moved on to slapps (AI slop apps).
Vibe coding is fun and great for personal projects or bootstrapping, but the specificity of the prompts needed to effect the change you want grows exponentially with the code base size to the point where you do just need to code it yourself and use the AI as a helper.
I've noticed a huge uptick in this brand of "entrepreneur". I think everyone who was inspired by devs like LevelsIO, limped their way through some code academy tutorials and was discouraged that you actually needed to have _some_ technical skills back in the mid 2010s is now encouraged to try again with vibe coding. It's always a combo of vibe coding + automation tools like n8n/zapier that does some simple data plumbing or just calls an API.
Just like you said, they all claim to make $xk per month and have a course to sign up for. I really hate this as places like product hunt are just gummed up now with Slapps (AI slop apps). The courses they sell seem to be how to quickly make Slapps, get people's email addresses and then use the authors email list management software (for a monthly fee) to endlessly send spam.
> It's always a combo of vibe coding + automation tools like n8n/zapier that does some simple data plumbing or just calls an API.
I agree with all that you said, however…
I have found that doing stuff that could be done with code with the automation tools/services that you mentioned above (plus excel) is often preferable for small businesses and certain orgs precisely so that a programmer doesn’t have to be called on every time a change is needed.
Not knocking programmers (I’ve been programming since age 10), but programmers aren’t always easy to hire and evaluate, and their cost (at least until recently) has been extremely high.
These automation tools allow for business to make a tech leap with much lower execution cost and risk.
So while I agree that a lot of the “vibe coding” stuff being promoted is drivel, that doesn’t mean that the tools themselves are not empowering in the right hands.
I have a Plex/Radarr/Sonarr setup on my home server. I've made a landing page so it's extra easy for my parents and friends to add media.
It's been really wonderful, everyone knows everyone by one degree of separation (me) and are adding to the library like a sort of group project. You can just hop on and see a somewhat currated library in the sense that someone you'll probably run into IRL thought this was worth watching.
So just to add to your point, you can't get this with a streaming service.
