Creating is fun for me again

Like many people, lately I’ve been struggling a lot with having fun programming in the AI Era. It’s quiet easy to lose the joy of it - creation, overcoming challenges, watching the code work after hours of trial and error - when you can feel the presence of “AI can do it faster” in the back of your head. I’m not the first one to write about this, I’m definitely not the last - this is just something that many people feel.

To fight this, I went back to areas I haven’t visited in years: Games development and writing. Areas that I find “safe” from the AI gloom, because you can still, and will be able for a long time, feel the difference between man and machine made content. The chaos of humanity still outweighs the theoretical quality of LLM generated content, and so I went back to channeling that chaos into something I can show to people.

Granted, I can’t just sit and create a book in the afternoon. Or a game, or even a single model I would need for the game. I still have way too much to learn in those areas, but it’s nice to feel the “righteous struggle” again. It’s nice to know that at least here I’m safe from overarching gloom.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not an enemy of LLMs everywhere, and I think in software development they have a huge place. But until I learn to actually, properly use them to build things like I would want to, I will feel afraid. And jumping away to creative spaces frees me a from this fear, bit by bit.

As a final thing, a small gif of a simple “tower defense” scene I have built. It’s not much, it’s not pretty, but it gave me a lot of joy to get from “what the what” to actually understand how it works and being able to build it.

Anyway. Having fun. Trying to find a not-so-gloomy place in a gloomy world.