I’ve been thinking on writing this for months since I came across an article called blogging in 2025. Worked for three years in an AI-first startup, I switched from hand-made code solutions with AI assistance, to be the assistant reviewing AI generated code. I felt something was stripped out of me. Now that I see that AI generated content has flooded the internet, merchandise, and It is used to basically produce a lot of digital goods like books (math books being sold at amazon allegedly written by AI), music, podcast scripts, damn, it is overwhelming.
I turn myself to question myself, after almost 9 years doing it, how come I became a software developer?
The Joy of the creative process Link to heading
Since I was a kid I pondered about the world around me, with high curiosity. Turns out I was (and I’m still) an autistic kid. Being curiosity driven, I majored in physics, so I could wonder about the world with new tools and methods: those of science. I find joy looking out for patterns, formulate hypothesis, articulate models and attempt predictions and understanding of everyday phenomena. I worked with biophysics for most of my serious research, but mental experiments and napkin models is something I did whenever I was alone drinking coffee or waiting at a queue. I remember my amazement when programmed a simulation of gravitational pull in C and then a simple graph scripted in GNUPlot, all from first principles.
I did partake on a club of indefinite integrals, and a group of computational simulations and algorithms. I did a fair amount of research around the topic of Numerical Solution of Ordinary Differential Equations, which lead me to write odeint (Writing this blog, I remember i was invited to collaborate in gonum and I didn’t, I’ll give it a try).
I’ve being doing a career interruption since my last contract ended last May. I gave myself time to process four things,
- Being unemployed after years of coding, the sudden feel of being overworked and disappointed by all my efforts and loyalty.
- Being diagnosed as member of the autism spectrum as an adult.
- Being away of a lot of people I love
- The feeling that AI stole something from me, and like software lacked some spark it used to have for me.
I closed my laptop and gave myself a month away. I found refuge in contemplating life, and then, out of the blue, I was wondering how to estimate the waiting times on a queue at the bank. Or how to compute the best decision on a probabilistic game (I’ll go back to those problems), and that’s how I resorted to math, to thinking for myself, not AI-first bullshit, and it was like a spark suddenly flickered. I started studying again, taking a look at my old notes, computing numerical problems. I read the book Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert Martin, and I think that the fundamentals of software development before jumping again to the workforce.
The Joy of the creative process Link to heading
It was all about the joy of the creative process. I did those thinks because they where fun and gave me a sense of purpose. I think, part of the social problem with AI is that it stripped out the sense of purpose, belonging, stimulation that the creative process can give. Our ancestors painted the walls of caves, I want to believe it was for the same reason.
“Painting of humans dancing on a cave”
What does this mean to me? Link to heading
I started blogging way back then and I did it because I enjoyed it. I started programming before it was all AI generated and my job. So, I’ll keep doing it. I’ll keep writing code without AI to keep my abilities sharp and be best at making software work. I refuse to let AI-first and “Delivery-first” to roast my brain and make me feel useless. I’ll work in whatever the current software development landscape is now, RePPITS, Loops, Skills, whatever it is the mainstream adopted framework. To the extent time and life let me, I’ll keep my learning process, and using my brain as it is intended to.
As part o my resistance against AI Slopped produced information, I’ll start writing my own critique on AI stuff as a human that makes mistakes. Also, when is appropriate, I’ll give my kudos too.