From time to time people ask how I can draw or paint if I am a Data Scientist. For many, those seem like opposite poles of human interests. The answer is simple: I like the process of creating things. I also like cooking, where potato peeler v1.4 will never have incompatibility issues with potato type v2.6, and lately some carpentry.
The thing is, I see coding very differently from cooking or drawing. The latter feel closer to the spirit of creation, while the former often feels more like a way to ensure survival and comfort in a world where capitalism has taken many of us out of poverty, even if the poverty threshold itself is probably outdated or completely broken by today's standards.
With the arrival of AI, especially in coding, something interesting has become noticeable. Coding is something many people see as a necessary evil in the process of creating, or more commonly said, building something. And I am realizing that I never actually enjoyed the frustrations of potato peeler v1.4 against potato type v2.6.
Now, with the magic of vibe coding, those frustrations are often easy to solve. The process of building something becomes far more enjoyable. I suspect this is a common feeling among programmers, data scientists and similar professions. The joy of creating, and doing it much faster, is bigger now than before, when sometimes you would not even start a project simply because you knew you would never find the time. Now there is not really an excuse.
Still, it feels concerning that so many people spent years suffering over things like changing the color of a fucking button from dark blue to light blue and somehow encountering ten different issues in the process. Yes, the example is simplistic, but you know what I mean. Many people chose careers like this simply to survive.
I have talked with several friends about why programming is so well paid, or why the rest of jobs are so badly paid. A common answer is that we generate more money, but it often feels like we give very little to the world. Plenty of technologies, startups and projects are absolute trash, built as some sort of ridiculous daycare for office workers. Think of things like the Metaverse, which was widely criticized because anyone outside the bubble could see it was not going to be nearly as fantastic as it was sold to be.
The question that kept coming up was simpler. Why should an artist usually be poor when they create something that actually means something, while someone moving buttons on a webpage for dog clothes makes five times as much? Are dogs so expensive to dress now, or is it just the magic of scale?
This should not be surprising to anyone. When COVID hit and people had to stay home, the important jobs were not your 9 to 5 Zoom carousel refining tickets for a web search feature. The important jobs were the woman taking care of the elderly who had just fallen to the floor, and the guy loading trucks with groceries so you could eat.
Your Jira ticket and your pull request to the monorepo might have mattered if you were implementing a video alarm system for that elderly woman at home. But the truth is that most of us were doing something else: moving buttons, reading Confluence pages and training Bag of Words models. So scale alone does not explain everything. A picture of a painting on Instagram might matter more to someone than the comment you leave somewhere on the internet while taking a shit.
AI is bringing something quite shocking to this equation. Anybody will be able to code.
For years we heard things like "this image model will make all artists unemployed" or "this pipeline will kill Hollywood artists". And now it might be us. Pretty deserved, to be honest. Horses never learned to drive.
The difference is that the doctor might soon be able to code and still be a doctor. The VFX artist will be able to use a model and still be a VFX artist. They will continue creating art, writing poetry or taking care of patients. Will you code for yourself? Did you actually enjoy those months studying Data Structures and Algorithms just to end up working in a Databricks notebook?
Vibe coding might be both the nail and the redemption. We may become obsolete as a technical elite, but we might also start creating far more than we ever could before. Perhaps this is what people mean when they say that now you can just do things. The art of creation without suffering through a nasty CI/CD pipeline.
For years we confused programming with creation, when most of the time it was just friction management. Will we start understanding creation now, or will we suffer a shock when the subsidization of AI stops?
