I miss the grind of writing software before AI

1 point

3 months ago

I learned HTML at 10, spent an entire summer figuring out how to link webpages together. At 14 I built a CNN-based security camera system for a school science fair — took months, 14-16 hour days, and I had no idea what I was doing when I started.

Today I told Claude to fine-tune an LLM on my X posts. Prompt to finished model with a web UI in 30 minutes. I was impressed and unsatisfied at the same time. I achieved my goal but learned nothing — I don't even know which libraries it used.

I'm not anti-AI. I use it for everything now. But the old way of writing software — the googling, the failed experiments, being stuck on a bug for days — that's where the actual learning happened. Every feature forced you to understand the codebase, read docs, weigh tradeoffs.

I just wish the 14-year-old me had something left to figure out on his own.

Link to the full article: https://open.substack.com/pub/princerawat/p/software-in-the-age-of-ai?r=yts8r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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