The Losing Soul's of Human Creation in Software in the AI World
As the title says, i am not gonna explain what's an AI is, or LLMs and that nature of things. i just wanna explain a bit more about more of a personal opinion about how i feels that i like an old software more than most of modern software today. i am not saying that today's software is bad or anything like that, no.
Some of my friends know that i love using old software more than modern software. maybe it's kind of a habit for me because for the first time i got my own laptop, it sort of a bit old ones with a limited resource. i started learning to code using that laptop, so to say i am not using Visual Studio Code. instead, i use vim/neovim. because it's too much to handle for my laptop if i use vscode, meaning i can't very much opening a browser. even if i can maybe i can't open more than 3 tabs at a time. people saying i'm crazy because it's not convenient. and my teacher says that i should use vscode because it's the "industry standard" so to say. but later on i started to feels more comfortable using vim or sometimes neovim rather than to use vscode because i started to get the feels of it, the vim motion, fast movement and it work smoothly with my terminal centric workflows.
I remember the first time i was using vim when i first installed Debian 12 on that laptop. i had to change some config, and the tutorial says i have to use vim. i was very confused, i can't even get out of vim. i don't know what does :q mean, where do i type it, and my config doesn't get saved. hence i say "screw vim, i'm gonna try to edit it using emacs instead" because i saw emacs have a graphical user interface. i am too scared to use something in the terminal. i have a pretty good times with emacs, i use default emacs and i don't mind using it, it have everything i need. (i can't even imagine someone using vscode to edit a config file).
As the time move on, it's been several years since the first time i use linux as my daily driver. i feels more comfortable having control over all my stuff, it feels wrong when i don't use it. i get a better laptop with a better hardware spec, there's no more reason for me to use an old, janky software/editor like vim or emacs right? i began to install Arch Linux on my new laptop, configure everything the way i want it. ahh, it feels good to type in the terminal to partition my disk, installing some stuff, etc.
I use vscode for most of the time being. for work, learning to code, etc. but then i started to feel empty, the joy is gone, with all the convenient it have. so i started to install neovim, i configure it manually form scratch, no starting kit, no bloated stuff being installed. because of my workflows for work mostly using AI Agent, so there's no need for fancy features like lsp, and etc. just so i am being able to edit some stuff, reviews some diffs, and some kind of that nature.
I started to feels the joy again. you see, there's a different feels between an old software and the modern software, (i don't mean just the UI difference, workflows, etc). there's something different while using it, i mean if you ask the reason is obviously the age gaps, the computing resource at that time, and etc. then i started to use emacs again, i want to use it mostly for the org-mode. emacs started it's development in the 1976, so it considered old. i love the emacs looks, the way it handles things, everything is just a simple text buffer, it's kinda junky but feels very hacky. i feel that emacs still have a souls to it, GNU Emacs is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp, also implemented in C, as an extension language. i feels very different while using emacs to do some work, different of course from when i use vscode. the UI is very unique. and because it's not using electron, it feels very snappy and fast.
You see, AI Agent makes most of human works faster, especially in the software technology. but there's a price we must pay, the souls, it becomes hollow. there's this weird detachment when the thing you're building isn't fully coming from your own head anymore. back then when i struggled with vim, when i couldn't even figure out how to quit, that struggle was mine, the config i finally got working was mine. now, half the time, i'm just prompting, waiting, accepting. it works, but it doesn't feel like mine the same way.
Recently, i read this article from codeberg. and it's pretty much something i scared of, and the ones that's very interesting is this section:
It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
There's this illusion for a vibe coders, the "community", while they were typing for prompt, they doing equal to a team.
I define "intelligence" as being capable of knowing or understanding, at least within some domain. ChatGPT cannot know or understand anything, so it is not intelligence. It does not know what its output means. It has no idea that words can mean anything.
Maybe this is not the LLMs fault, maybe it's just my fault that can't move on from old software because of my attachment to my first laptop. i don't have a bold resolution about LLMs, i'm not saying that i reject the use of an AI in the human world. having a soul in a software doesn't directly mean that the software is alive, maybe it's the human effort put into the proccess of creating it, the joy human put while working in it, or the creative design desicion made by human to make it very cool.
i still open my terminal every morning, i still use my AI agent every day. i just don't know, someday, when i look back, will i remember making this, or just approving it.
