Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Obviously if one really cares about the output and not the craft itself, then it's different. But I don't feel like that is the central example of "I'm writing software for fun". But yes, if that's you (and @MathWizard), you might decide to hold off based on your personal evaluation of how quickly we will have AI tools available to do that for you.
I would say I'm not convinced that will be soon. Right now AI generated content sucks ass. I'm not reflexively against it (though you might not believe me), but it just is bad and not worth my time even if I want to Consoom (TM). And that's just talking about creative endeavors (not my area of expertise), where I can only really judge the output from a layman's perspective. If we are talking about programming (which is my area of expertise), AI is laughably bad. It's so bad at writing code that it's a drain on productivity, because you have to check everything it does to make sure it is correct. LLMs are a really neat party trick, but right now that's all they are. They still can't actually do anything useful.
Could it get better? Sure. But people have been saying "it's gonna get better in a year or two" for years now, and it still isn't there. At this point, there's not evidence to suggest that AI is going to be able to do these tasks competently within the next 5 years or so. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but I think that people predicting AI to do all these wonderful things (meaning no personal disrespect to you) are getting caught up in hype without any substance behind it at this time.
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