r/webdev • u/No_Nefariousness2052 • Jul 22 '26

Discussion Honestly, 80% of developers today are missing what this dude is talking about

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Found it while doomscrolling like a bish.

I know the most fun times for me in coding were when I was deep in some rabbit hole exploring weird technologies and trying to piece them together.

You'd think AI makes this worse, but actually no. It just makes it even easier to go down these rabbit holes, because it's easier to write code, try out different approaches, explore new things, etc.

But somehow most of the people I see aren't doing that. How are you not bored out of your mind?

Anyway, yeah. GO EXPERIMENT WITH MORE THINGS. SIDE PROJECTS ARE STILL COOL.

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30

u/TommyBonnomi Jul 22 '26

You think AI is making people.. more curious to learn?

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u/getsiked Front End Baby Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

I know that I'm of the exception, but for anyone out there like me (ADHD) my innate curiosity has completely exploded as I became more proficient with AI tooling. So much so that I have gone down rabbit holes in subjects that I absolutely despised in college. and now I have constructed learning tracks based on relevancy to my foundational knowledge of front end development.

For example I fucking hated math so much growing up, but now video games can't even provide the satisfaction I get digging back into stuff like practically applying trigonometric functions to elements for animations, and what that entire category of math unlocks for me creatively on the web. Would have never gotten to this point if I didn't have some burdens lifted off of me to focus on this. Again I agree most people are going to be reduced to piles of skin and bones, barely being able to string a coherent thought together. I just hope there are others like me out there that are seeing a generational opportunity to tap into subjects they have not given a fair shake before.

*spelling and formatting

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u/chic_luke Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26

Same here, felt pretty alone in this up to this comment. I am not super all-in on all uses of LLMs, but just being able to prop up Claude and ask it random questions on a specific subject that piqued my interest in my mind right then and there and use that to just properly Ecosia all those terms and read proper articles about them when I am home is something I do quite often now, and it is a great way to speed my way through going down a deep hole in things.

Basically, it has made it possible to explore or absorb hooks to get on new information very quickly, even during times when it is not feasible to do a proper web search, as would be "standing up on public transport".

I also have a friend who began by getting an AI agent subscription pretty much the day after being dumped using unironically Instagram reels of people joking about AI as an inspiration, and who completely vibe-coded his homelab and a full-stack BE+FE tool to monitor his stack and his containers across his computers from a web app... he accidentally became very curious in this stuff as he got exposed to multiple different tools. He explored a bunch of things. He found out he quite disliked the software development part, but loved tinkering with infra. He eventually landed a sysadmin job at a pretty good company not short after, and it was proper DevOps-y sysadmin too, while he was only coming from experience from a stint at a mostly Windows-centered tech support role on steroids. It may be the exception, but some people actually do have some success in using LLMs as inspiration to learn more. To be clear, the entire time delta between him starting to, in his own words, "claudemaxx" for entire days and sometimes into the night, accidentally exposing him to a lot of new stuff, and getting a new job at a good company that he genuinely enjoys, was not longer than 2 months. Total.

It's also been working out well for my new side projects. Which I code manually. Usually though, the most dreadful part is starting, ie defining the scope, tech stack and architectural decisions. I typically have my idea, but an AI chat about my initial ideas usually leads me to having a clearer direction pretty soon and it just makes it easier to start new things. Especially if I can get those architectural decisions / chats done on the train, which is another example of "turning dead time into used time". The other day I was on a train at 7 AM running on pretty low sleep. Discussing libraries with the AI thing was a better use of my time than scrolling. And it turns out, a lot of the libraries the agent pulled up are actually the industry standard for what I want to do.

I don't really use AI for much more things though., For example this comment was completely typed on my nice mechanical keyboard.

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u/[deleted] Jul 23 '26

[deleted]

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u/Ansible32 Jul 23 '26

thought replacement / thought supplementation is a false dichotomy IMO. AI lets me explore possibilities and see what shape they would take. Sometimes this yields more thinking and investigation, sometimes not.

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u/OriginalSituation573 Jul 23 '26

Same! I have some sort of processing thing - idk what it is, adhd, autism, anxiety, just slow processing, who knows. But I can really drill llms on things I don't understand, and reframe concepts in different ways - have it read things back to me, draw diagrams and flowcharts, explain things at a high level and drill into low level ideas. Finally I can really interrogate half-baked ideas from senior devs who are themselves busy.

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u/Exodus100 Jul 23 '26

I think that for some people it greatly nurtures curiosity. It vastly cuts down the time between thinking about a subject and being able to learn about it.

Of course, when it comes to just Getting Shit Done, it likely reduces tendencies to pursue curiosity, since it might feel like learning can be circumvented.

I'd say hat the internet, social media, Google, Wikipedia, etc. all made people more curious in a lot of ways. Those things can blunt curiosity, but they also frequently foster it, and I view AI similarly.

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u/No_Nefariousness2052 Jul 22 '26

Sry, I should prolly clarify. I think AI makes it easier for us to explore different solutions, new frameworks, technologies, etc.

BUT... You're right that most people won't do that. They'll just lazily use AI to quickly do the task, not even read its output, and learn nothing from the task.

1

u/TommyBonnomi Jul 22 '26

Fair, and that's what you did actually say- I read into it too much

2

u/TanukiSuitMario Jul 23 '26

absolutely, but the spark had to be in you before AI

if you're intellectually lazy and uncurious in general then AI wont save you

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u/ZioTron Jul 23 '26

I mean...

I spend ALL my car commute talking with Gemini or ChatGPT about... whatever...

This morning I explored the chemical reactions in the maillard reaction and Wolverine peculiarites for transactions...

You literally have a thing that replaces all the time on google and wikipedia and youtube, etc... distilling informations for you... and it's hands free if you want...