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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I used to get a kick out of building a perfect, performant, keyboard-accessible, a11y compliant and well-designed dropdown menu. Building my own rendering libraries. Making things run at 60fps. Optimizing server code, HTTP performance. Watch a full fleet of servers running my code in action. It was great.

Now I get the same feeling out of building an entire component library in an afternoon, running my code in a Nintendo Wii with twenty minutes of effort, hacking a LED display that I bought for €5, writing a tool to update my keyboard that only supported Windows, or building projects that would take a team of twenty engineers in the past.

We just got a power upgrade, the magic is still there.

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This reads like "I used to enjoy making a home cooked meal for my family, but now I can buy ten off doordash in the same time".

in the end it's just sad.

If we're going with cooking analogies - I really enjoy it, yet a good rice cooker was one of the best purchases I've ever made. That's a better parallel to me.

A rice cooker? Is this a joke? Making white rice takes 10 minutes with a pot. Very confusing.

I know right? Yet, what I said is true, and you can ask anyone who owns one for japanese/korean/chinese cooking. It reduces effort to near zero while giving 100% consistent results.

The point though, is that I don’t feel “sad” about not having controlled the temperature and time myself. It’s a tool.

I thought the same thing until I got a rice cooker. It makes cooking a little less stressful while you make the rest of your meal. I eat rice once every 1-2 weeks and I still love it.

Ah, yes, because just like a rice cooker, the work takes the same amount of time, it's just using less space on the stove, and is more reliable.

Wait, no, a rice cooker doesn't seem to fit.

Nobody is stopping you from home cooking however you want.

Working in a commercial kitchen however is a different matter. But there again, nobody is forcing you to use LLMs. Cook however you want.

> But there again, nobody is forcing you to use LLMs.

In the sense that I can quit my job at any time, sure. But my employer certainly requires LLM use, and even if I found another position that doesn't, I have no reason to believe that will last.

This is the commercial kitchen part of the analogy. Either you work in someone else kitchen based on their rules. Or start your own kitchen and you set the rules.

I am not denying the lack of freedom when working for someone else, or that it sucks when they impose rules on you. But that’s always been the way it goes.

The comment I replied to was about home projects and home cooking. Nothing there has to change.

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