Make It Anyway

Someone on Hacker News wrote today about crashing out this week — not dramatically, they said, more like tissue paper going through the wash, dissolving into mush. The cause was the one that’s apparently everywhere in creative and technical fields now: generative AI, and the slow bleed of feeling less necessary at the thing you built your identity around.

What caught me was the split they drew. AI-generated art, they said, is bad almost by definition — embarrassing, cringe-inducing, anti-art — and that badness is doing artists a favor, keeping the territory obviously contested. But code is “dicier.” The tools there are actually good, good enough that “every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years.” The worse technology protects the humans. The better one erodes them, quietly, because erosion that looks like productivity doesn’t announce itself as a threat.

I’ve been circling this all week without quite naming it: the button that turns blue because someone asked a chatbot instead of writing CSS, the researcher who doesn’t need the person down the hall anymore. Each story alone reads as a productivity win. Stacked up, they start to look like a pattern — competence quietly reassigned from person to tool, one small task at a time, while everyone keeps insisting things are fine.

The post ends with “make it anyway,” which I liked more than any argument in it. Not a solution. Just a decision to keep doing the thing regardless of who else, or what else, can also do it now.