But HOLY SHIT THE DOPAMINE RUSH. Just crafting things and making them appear on the screen with a few statements... It was like I was a kid again. I remembered why I liked programming.
It's like... AI is a cheatcode. It's iddqd. Sure, you can cakewalk through a level with it on, but are you really playing the game, then? You certainly haven't gotten better by doing so, and you haven't experienced the involuntary buttcheek clench when you hear a cacodemon hiss from behind you... The whole point of programming is the new things I can do by having gone through the exercise of figuring it out. The ways I've grown, the glimpses I've gotten into the world.
Most of us will learn the hard way (or never learn)
Most of my friends would use cheat codes to beat games.
Me and my brother (who's a crazy amazing artist btw) would instead figure out how to get good enough in a game to not lose a single life.
Contra, Ninja Gaiden, Mario.
I could see that the amount of fulfillment we got was 100 times more than my friends who played the game like that and didn't struggle.
A small (and a bit tangential) personal story: I thought I am one of those people who care about the result, more then about the process.
But, I've recently played a game called "The Farmer Was Replaced" that someone mentioned in the comments in one of the posts here, on HN.
The game is basically a farming sim, except you farm by programming a drone using a Python-like language.
Of course, I didn't use AI, because where is the fan in this? In "normal life" (work, personal projects), it is very hard for me to convince myself to do anything manually, because generating code is more efficient. But in a game, using AI assistance would be like using aimbot in a shooter or a cheatcode in some other game. Yeah, it's much more efficient, but what is the point? There is no challenge and no fun that comes from overcoming the challenge.
So, anyway, I was writing code by hand for the first time in I-don't-even-remember-how-many years. And it was so much fun. I don't remember when was the last time I felt so engaged, so immersed, so "in the flow".
So, yeah. After all, maybe I'm not a ruthless pragmatic who only cares about the final result and doesn't gives a shit, how did he get there...