Transcription
AI has completely oneshotted my ability to code. Like, I know a lot of us like to joke about AI psychosis and how it's the other people who have AI psychosis and not us, and not me, certainly. But I, I have realized that I have been oneshotted. Like, I can't code anymore.
My brain has been fried by the easy button that the LLM companies have provided, where you press a button and you get instant results. And now my dumbass brain, when I want to sit there and try to code by hand, it says, "Why would you do that? Why would you code by hand when you could press a button and get similar results, seemingly? Why the hell would you do this by hand, you idiot?"
And so now I'm like, I need to ship a software product, but I'm completely at the mercy of the AI companies to build a model for me that can do my job. But there's a couple problems with that. One is that responsible developers are presumably supposed to be like, reviewing their code. In practice, everyone knows that you can't review AI code. Not only is it impossible to keep up with the AIs, they want to move like 1,000 miles an hour, and we're here like 30 miles an hour, like reading, trying to understand every line. It's impossible to keep up with.
And so the question is, well, can we ship products without reviewing the code? And in recent videos, I've been trying to warm up to that idea because it is what I need to ship my product. Take OpenClaw as proof of that. Peter Steinberger never looked at the code. It's huge. It's a monstrosity. He's never looked at the code, and he's testament to just what can be done. I guess if you don't care about the code, it's no secret that if you don't look at the code, you'll go really fast.
In my last video, I likened vibe coding to essentially evolution with natural selection, where evolution seemingly has no idea what it's doing. To code up something as precise as a hand, it doesn't say, "Hey, I want to make a hand. How do I code it up?" No, it tries random things, and if it passes the tests, it adds it to the DNA stack. As long as you survive, you'll add your DNA to the gunk of the DNA codebase, which is absolutely incomprehensible, inscrutable, and yet it made us.
And so it's like, well, if evolution can do that, why can't I have this LLM, which is not even, it's better than random, clearly? And if you pit it up with some tests, as long as it passes those tests, then why can't I do something like evolution does? Like, you know, if it's good enough to make me, it's good enough to make my damn to-do app.
Yesterday was a perfect opportunity to test that hypothesis. ChatGPT 5.4 came out yesterday, and everyone's somewhat raving about it. So, I was like, okay, let's try that. The directive that evolution seemingly gives to natural organisms is, "Don't die." And as long as you do that, you're doing something good. And so I was like, "All right, what is the directive for me to make my product go from not existing on the internet to existing on the internet and getting customers?"
And so I was like, "Okay, well, the app is currently on my machine. It's on localhost, but I need it to be deployed to an actual environment, and I need people to be able to hit the download button and be able to sign up and start using the app." So I was like, "Okay, that is the validation criteria. That's a survival. That's the end result. Now, in theory, I should be able to give that end result to an LLM model, and if I give it the right environment, if I give it the right tools, then it should be able to automate that result from start to finish."
So that's what I did. I gave Codex 5.4. It had access to the AWS command line. It had access to the GitHub API so that it could read the pipelines and see how things are doing. It could commit the code. I said, "Just do it all. I'm not going to look at the code." And so I started it on that prompt, and it worked. Like, you know, you go on shape.work right now, you can hit the download button. Everything works. It's there.
But there's a problem. And it's that I have no idea who I am anymore in this process. Software is like, especially in the ground phases, in the early days, zero phases, it's supposed to be a really intimate thing between you as the provider and the users that you are trying to sell your product to. You're offering your users something more than just, you know, commodity software that they can get from Microsoft or Google or something. You're offering something like artisanal, handcrafted, really close support, a really tight feedback loop.
And yet, what I created here is something that I have no emotional attachment to. I'm unable to sell it. I'm unable to like offer it to my users because I have no feelings towards it because I didn't do anything to, I, I didn't earn it. I didn't suffer for it. I've like created this like hot dog that it's presumably food, but no one really knows what's inside. It's just encased in some kind of synthetic wrapper, and it's like, "Here, here's food." And you take the hot dog, and it, you put it in the sandwich. It fits in the sandwich. You put the ketchup or not, and you take a bite. You're like, "This tastes good. This tastes like food. It has calories." And so the transaction has been completed. I, you pay money, you get some calories.
But I can't do that. I can only work on something that I'm passionate about. And the second I lose interest in something, you can't pay me a billion dollars to do it. Like, I can't work on something I'm not passionate about. And now I've seemingly created a hot dog business, and my job is to sell it. Well, I don't want to do that.
Typically, as craftspeople, as developers, as engineers, as artists, the art changes us while we work on it because we struggle and we suffer for it. We work for it. We go to sleep uncertain about how we're going to solve this problem, and we wake up with a solution and we're excited by that and enlivened by that. And all that is gone. Now there's no more suffering or struggling for things and being changed by things and having your brain expand and grow. You no longer become a better person by doing projects. That was the number one way everybody like me figured out how to launch a business or how to become a developer if you were self-taught. You did it by just doing things. And now we're all making hot dogs. I don't know how to feel any kind of emotional bond to the output of my work anymore.
I have a sense that a lot of us may be in this sort of liminal waiting space where no one has any idea what's happening anymore. You have like World War II starting between countries and other countries. World War II between governments and AI labs. You have the looming threat of AI putting us all out of work, figuring out what use we have anymore. In the meantime, we're distracting ourselves with like McDonald's new sandwich and the Shape store. I think everyone is in mass psychosis and we don't even realize it. And I don't even know what could be done anymore.
We're holding our breath for these two AI labs to figure out what is the caliber of these models. Are our jobs safe or not? And it's why you have two very heated camps trying to adapt to the new world. One camp says, "You're going to get left behind. Here's how you adapt. You got to use the tools." The other camp says, "No, these LLMs are idiotic statistical machines. Like, you'll get left behind if you use them."
And honestly, that's the camp that I'm feeling like I'm in. I've used these tools, and now I've one-shotted my brain. My brain is completely useless now. Has no use for coding. The only way for me to get it back, I can get it back, but I would have to just delete Codex, uninstall it, cancel my subscription. I'm not going to do that realistically because there will be some tasks that I know AI will be good for.
But here's the problem. You can say like, okay, just do the really hard stuff yourself, and when it comes to like a laborious, mundane task, just have the AI do it. And that's what I tried. But what happens is you're working on something really hard, and so you spend like a day doing it, you're coding, and by the end of it, you're like, "Man, that was hard. It was rewarding, but it was hard." And then you're like, "Okay, let's have the AI now wire everything up." So you say, "AI, wire everything up for me." And it does it in like 10 minutes, and it oneshots it, and you're like, "Oh, wow. That was really easy. Why am I, why don't I do this more often?"
It's a real drug, man. I think it is. It's the best way to describe it is it's a drug, and you can't wean off. Once you do it, you just want to do it all the time. And the only way to regain your sense of humanity is to get rid of the drug altogether. There's no, there's no middle ground of like, "Mondays and Tuesdays I'll do crack, Wednesdays a little bit of heroin, but Friday through Sunday I'm going to be clean. I promise." No, it's not going to happen. You got to go cold turkey.
And for me right now, I'm unwilling to do that because I've just, it's, I've just, it's just gotten so bad. The dependence has gotten so bad. My livelihood is at stake here. It used to be if you were an engineer, you could always like go take a one-year sabbatical and go like work on some woodworking projects that you know, like cutting boards that you'll sell online or something. But you could always just hop right back into another dev job, right? That was always the premise before AI. Every single developer, probably the reason we're so cocky, right? Everyone who's not a developer hates developers. That's why they love seeing AI take us over. We were so cocky because we knew that you needed us, and we could step away, and you'd beg us to come back, and every developer could go take a year off and come back to like a higher paying job than they had before.
And now I don't know if that's the same reality we live in anymore. What does the interview look like today? Could I get a job as an engineer? What does it mean to be an engineer now? How do I impress an interviewer? Like, what's my resume like? Oh, I could code JavaScript at 3 miles an hour. Like, what value is that anymore? I don't know. And you know what it means to be in a job. I don't know what anything means anymore.
It's a form of psychosis. Honestly, the only way, the only way is to delete these tools. Honestly, I may have just talked myself up to do that, man. Like, seriously, I may have to become like anti-AI. Like, I don't know, man. I'm like losing myself. I'm losing my ability to care about things. I'm losing my ability to care about like software art anymore. I can't sell this junk. It's working. Yes, it works. It's functional. It'll take you from point A to point B, but there's no pride in it for me.
Maybe you'll just say, well, hey, how's that any different from hiring an employee who does all the work? But presumably, you also hire like-minded people who are passionate. You don't want to hire a drone who just checks in and clocks out every day. Okay, you know, you want to hire like-minded people who have the same passion. Can't hire a passion LLM. So the whole thing is just completely soulless. It's unsellable.
I thought my hurdle was like an ethical qualm against vibe coding. But it turns out that even if I suspend my ethical dilemmas, you end up just with something you don't have any interest in selling. My only option forward is to write this by hand. But I've lost that skill. And and I also know that it is a lot of work. LLMs remind us more than anything about how much work it was to actually ship a finished product. That stuff takes years, man. It does. And an LLM could do that for you. If you do the devil's bargain, it'll do that for you in like a day.
What we do is because the deal is so damn good, we change ourselves to make that deal acceptable. And what I've figured out now is that I'm unwilling to change myself to make that deal acceptable. I thought I'd be willing to because, hey, I'm, I want to be a savvy businessman who doesn't care about what the product is. You should be able to sell anything. And this is day one of me recognizing that I probably need to really delete ChatGPT.
Am I the only one feeling this way? Like, what does it feel like to be an employee? What does it feel like to be someone looking for a job? To be disconnected from your work, or are you having more fun at work? Like, what is going on? Please share your story. And if you think there's a way to make this all work that I'm missing, please let me know.