Mastodawn

Two reasons why I’m not interested in letting AI ghostwrite for me:

1) Writing is how I think things through and come to conclusions.

2) Above all, I am motivated by the possibility that I have not yet written the best thing I’ll ever write.

https://www.wired.com/story/tech-reporters-using-ai-write-edit-stories/

Meet the Tech Reporters Using AI to Help Write and Edit Their Stories

Independent writers are using AI agents all throughout their reporting process. What’s the value of a human journalist, anyway?

WIRED

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Morgan Aldridge 2d ago

@harrymccracken As a developer who also often enjoys writing, describing a bug/problem or a project scope is an important part of understanding & organizing my thoughts.

While writing and debugging actual code can be frustrating, time consuming, and exhausting, it's also the most interesting and **insightful** part of the process. You have to understand the project, the goal, and the previous developer's thought process (even if only your own.)

Similarly, I haven't written my best code yet!

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Harry McCracken 1d ago

@morgant I am loving vibecoding, but still am confronting the fact that I feel guilty I can’t code at that level on my own.

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Morgan Aldridge 22h ago

@harrymccracken I can certainly understand that and I think that's part of my underlying worry about the use of generative AI. Since you already think about the impact of using AI in other areas of your work and actively considering your thoughts/feelings when you do use AI, you're probably more likely to learn from the results of your vibecoding sessions. What percentage of others will do similar and will similar guilt dissuade them from improving themselves and instead rely on AI more?

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Morgan Aldridge 22h ago

@harrymccracken I have to admit that I haven't tried vibecoding yet, but partly because I've been turned off by results I've seen from the AI pull request reviews some of my clients have configured. AI does identify some quick stuff, but often misinterpret obvious things, and is wildly off on their actual business processes.

Of course, I also already battle with #ImposterSyndrome and that other developers are, "Better, faster, more productive," to lift a line from #Radiohead's #ParanoidAndroid.

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Morgan Aldridge

@harrymccracken We're in this surreal stage of generative AI where we've made the prompt (and refinement) process a believable natural-language discussion with the AI. This makes it feel like we're interracting with a human, but the results that we're getting are superhuman. Hard not to compare oneself.

(While I say 'superhuman' I mean "super-average human." A friendly, agreeable, seemingly knowledgable person with super speed that gives shoddy results but will unceasingly refine the results.)