@aeva These last few years have broken something deep within me and I have no idea what to do with myself now.

It's not about the generative whatever particularly, that's certainly not helped but it's mostly yet another manifestation of something that's been eating at me for way longer.

@aeva I want to understand, and to be understood.

That's not the only thing about me, but it's a core tenet about my personality and my construction of identity.

Almost everything I do flows from that in one way or another.

That's why I default to these long, rambling info-dumps, for example.

@aeva My parents were gracious about this, other adults in my life, less so.

Shout-out to the teachers at my nursery school who decided that a 4yo couldn't possibly actually want to know how a differential transmission worked and that therefore I must be some attention-whoring little bitch who loves to pick up words I don't understand and who should really shut the fuck up. (Not in those words, mind - this was a CATHOLIC pre-school! - but the sentiment was there.)

@aeva er, lots more to unpack there I guess (not for here!) but suffice it to say that the preemptive infodumping is a tic I picked up right around that time (I was verbal pretty early, but the infodumping started then - there's "video evidence" from my uncle, who had a camcorder. Very clear diff between me before/after entering nursery school).

So, er, yeah. Some damage there. Anyway, the over-explaining/desperately wanting to be understood has _deep_ roots.

@aeva More to the actual point, like it or not, this has just turned into a schema of what I look for in personal relationships.

(It's just been really hard all my life to find anyone who can actually follow along when I get going.)

Anyway. What does this have to do with the current mess? I'm getting there, but first another, much more recent episode.

@aeva This was a few years ago, on Twitter.

A mutual, who I'd met in person, replied to me posting a link to a new blog post with something to the effect of "Oh great! Always love your posts. Usually don't understand a word though."

They thought they were giving me a compliment, what they actually gave me were the seeds of an existential crisis.

And I know it was hyperbole, but the "don't understand a word" has been living rent-free in my head ever since.

@aeva It's one thing if at some point two thirds through a post I go off on some tangent that matters to me but that 95% of readers don't care about.

But "don't understand a word"? I really, _really_ try to make my technical writing as clear as I know how to and if the end result is, apparently, incomprehensible gobbledygook, then what the fuck is the point of writing any of it in the first place?

@aeva So that's _that_ light-hearted tangent.

Now, finally, on to my actual point.

As alluded to in both of these digressions, I deeply care both about understanding what I am doing, and about being understood.

Often to my detriment. I shouldn't care as much as I do. It's not something I can turn off. And like it or not, it's directly intertwined with my need for human connection.

@aeva Figuring out a solution to a problem, having a seed of understanding within it, and getting to share that seed with others is, not to mince words, the only reason I put up with any of this shit.

A friend mentioned his pet theory a while back that shepherding LLMs sucks for people who like programming because that means now they have to be managers and that's a different skill set.

@aeva That's not _entirely_ wrong but it's missing the point by a mile if you ask me.

It _is_ a different kind of activity, but it's not "management" either.

You get to play-act as the world's worst micro-manager constantly telling your "agents", who never learn a damn thing, to try again.

Mentoring or managing somebody (hopefully!) involves some kind of development where they learn something and grow into their position.

@aeva That's not what's happening here.

You're in a groundhog day loop with an intern with infinite stamina, ADHD and hopped up on 3 cans of Monster Energy cranking out piles of code between bouts of tachycardia, and every hour they hit the neuralyzer and need everything explained all over again.

I don't know what ring of hell exactly this is, but it _is_ a ring of hell, and it's not "management" by any sane definition of the term.

@aeva Mind, I'm not actually doing any of this stuff. But. BUT.

There are _so many_ people around me who are, apparently, dead set on treating the scenario I just described like it's a desirable outcome instead of a dystopian nightmare, and actively working towards it.

I guess if you treat programs as some necessary evil that's a speed barrier between you and all your glorious plans working out, there's some sense to that.

@aeva It just so happens to be that if you're some misguided rube like me, apparently, who cares about how programs can be some concrete embodiment of entirely abstract ideas that you could otherwise never communicate to anyone, this is just casually shitting on your life's work and going "yeah who needs THAT".

And I _hate_ how this sounds melodramatic and petty but I have no other words for it.

@aeva This is not about the tools themselves. There's _so many_ problems there, and much has been written about it, but that's not what I'm getting at.

The thing that's _really_ getting to me is just how much of the SW world, including so many people around me, is going "oh yes, finally" about this.

I've always felt pretty alone in my caring about things the way I do but was telling myself that I did find my people who care about things the same way in the end. Evidently, no.