Talking with a colleague about the current state of the AI ecosystem and... I really feel weird about it. It's clearly become its own skill set, and gosh darn, I can't deny wanting to learn it because I have had a lifelong instinct to learn tech skills that has served me well, professionally and personally. The idea I keep coming back to though is people are increasingly heaping rituals on top of a nondeterministic process to hopefully make it more deterministic and predictable, and now, to seemingly fit the best cost model to a given task.
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And all of it of course ignores the massive environmental cost. Yes, if you set up your looping harness and adversarial agentic models correctly, you can have it produce seemingly good code that at least passes a smell test, and produce it very quickly, but how much power was consumed, how much water, how many utility bills show a noticeable increase? Is it really worth the time saved? Maybe slow code is good enough.
It was easy at first to say, good, leave me behind, but now... I'm having to fight a core part of my personality, one I've never had to before. I really need to examine what it is about technology in general and code in particular that calls to me, because surely it's not just the output, right? Am I that simple and basic?
