The good things in life necessitate care
Disclaimer: this will sound like a hate piece towards AI. It kinda is one.
I find myself having only a minor existential crisis watching the software engineering industry move quickly towards AI coding. The days of coding by hand are slowly approaching their end. The code that I output is no longer primarily code that I have written but instead what an LLM predicted based on the prompt and context I gave it. Coding by hand involved translating design concepts and domain details directly through code, compared to giving an agent human language that describes those concepts and details. The output may end up being the same as what I would’ve written myself, but how I got there was completely different.
The shift that I felt inside me is that I don’t feel the same attachment towards AI-written code as I do to code I have written in the past. I output code faster, but I also happily throw away that code when I see that it could be done better or differently. That’s a much harder pill to swallow when it took several hours to write a solution vs ten minutes of prompting and thirty minutes of watching an agent work in the background. The code that an AI wrote is code that I don’t care about as much (Though the outcomes of that code are still important to me.) That lack of care is making the craft of coding not as enjoyable.
Caring is enjoyable
To care about doing something is more than just caring about the output, but the process too. Caring about the process for the things I do makes those things more enjoyable. Take for instance trying to plan a date for your partner: looking for places to go to and explore, food to eat, coordinating travel routes, all while taking into account your partner’s preferences and interests. That’s a process that takes effort, and showing care for that process is to show care for your partner. Now imagine if you asked ChatGPT to come up with that same date having saved memories about your partner based on previous conversations you had with it. It certainly could output a decent plan by doing all the web searches you would’ve done for you, but the process is different. Would that be more enjoyable? Would my partner and I be happier following the plan of an AI versus one that was handcrafted by one of us? I wouldn’t even say using AI is the issue here, but more the fact that there was less care put into it.
It takes genuine care to make good art, good music, good writing, good anything. If you ask any artist, musician, or writer if they enjoy what they’re doing, I promise you their answer will be correlated with how much care they put into their craft and it will show with what they make. Caring is an important factor in motivation. High motivation means you’ll continuously show up for your craft, which helps you improve. You don’t start out being good at what you do. But you most certainly can start out strong by caring about what you do.
Caring is a necessity
Whether it’s the career work we do, the way we show up for the people we care about, or just trying to make ourselves better people, these things being enjoyable will make our lives more fruitful. And to enjoy them at their best, we have to care.