I am not interested in AI tools

There’s certainly good arguments for using AI tools like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT, and there are certainly good arguments against them. This post isn’t about either. Instead, here’s my anecdote as to why I haven’t felt drawn to even try them out.

I was talking to a friend about DALL-E and how it is affecting the art community. The whole AI art gave me this odd dystopian feeling that I couldn’t quite articulate until this conversation. She told me that art isn’t about the end result. Artists make art because they love the process of making art.

And that’s why I’m not drawn to using AI tools for programming. I love the process of programming. I love the clean solutions, the bugs, the tests, the frustrations. I love thinking about trade-offs, the refactors and rewrites, the investigations and root causes, and the boundless minutia at every level.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think a lot of programmers enjoy the process of programming. It is, after all, a somewhat frustrating endeavor, especially starting out. The process of writing a program involves failing over and over again, and even when you succeed, there’s never a point where a program is “finished.” It can be exhausting, but maybe the end result is worth it for some people. I can certainly understand wanting to make the process more enjoyable, and maybe AI tools provide that.

Maybe AI will transform what it means to program, and maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll be drawn to AI in the future, and maybe nothing more will come of it. For now though, I’m content using my dumb fingers to write my own dumb programs.