I'm also an (amateur) writer and a (mostly past) developer.

I've recently created multiple software projects without writing a line of code, and I love it -- maybe that's because I've worked as a product manager for years: I'm already abstracted from the direct code. I still write code for fun (project euler, advent of code, learning new languages) but I can't imagine the slowness of creating a whole thing from scratch.

I've recently created a hard-science fiction novella. I used AI significantly for research and scientific review, but I wrote every word. I tried having the LLM write it, and the result was awful. Maybe someday (soon?) that will improve, but for now I have to do it the old-fashioned way.

I enjoy both coding and writing directly. But I can easily see a time when it's like jogging, or biking, or going to the gym, rather than being a hunter-gatherer or a factory worker -- a pleasant thing to do, with beneficial effects, but not something done to a specific end.

I am very similar. I am a software engineer, trying to make the transition to full time writer. A year ago, I "finished" a first draft of my novel and I used AI to write some of the prose so I could get to that completed draft.

Now I've finished the third draft, and I think I've finally eradicated all of that slop from the text. It was terrible writing. Prose is my strength, it's what I was best at, why would I pass that off to a clanker, when it's the thing I was born to do in this world?

There are lots of other ways AI is helping me write, though:

- Hard Sci-fi - it creates simulations of various spacecraft configurations and allows to me see how it would play out. - Research - Consistency Checking - Simulated Reviews from different perspectives. Not as good as human reviewers, but still very useful. - Notes organizations - Speculation tracking and canon differentiateion

I will never use AI to write prose again. Even if it got really good, the point isn't the prose. The point is that I have something to say, and I'm going to use my own words to say it. If an LLM wrote this prose, even if it was at the level of winning a major literary prize, it still wouldn't be the words I would write, and it isn't satisfying.

I am a reader. I want AI to create better writing. If it creates better writing than those of humans, so be it, it means I gonna read books written by AI.

The idea of AI writing books better than humans is alien to me, because judging good writing involves interpreting the emotions and ideas the author is trying to express through their writing. AI is not trying to express anything, and doesn't even have a mind to express.

For some people advancing the x is the point though. There is nothing wrong with that.

Nothing's stopping you from writing.

I work with a guy who spins his own yarn with a spindle. That's just all of us now.

Exactly, humans can work all the menial manual labour jobs, and the robots can take all the fun creative jobs. Win-win for everyone.

Manual work is not unsatisfying - the problems have to do with social disrespect, low pay, and lack of a safety net if your physical abilities decline.

People in the hacker news sphere underestimate the value or all labor. There is nothing inherently superior to coding - we are all just lucky recipients of the money and acclaim that this obscure skill has rewarded for the last couple of decades.

I took a few years off of programming to raise toddlers, clean, cook, volunteer in preschool and church, and it was a lot of fun and certainly challenging in the best sense of having to learn strategies and tactics to improve my outcomes and so on and fully engaging my whole person.

We may currently allocate resources to people one way but there’s not really a law of physics that condemns us to keep that same allocation if conditions change in the future.

It's certainly not the case with writing.

When you mean 'I am X' you mean 'I earn a living as a X'. Nothing stops from being X in your free time. The tension is that X has a diminishing number of similarly paid alternatives. As a programmer, you have likely automated many beloved jobs away before while you happily typed away. The difference is that now, automation isn't offering alternatives to the jobs destroyed.

Only fallen in love with crafts you can make a loving from? The point of these jobs was never supposed to be "Loxicon enjoyed doing them" but the point of the crafts themselves can (still) be any reason you fancy.

Of course "and what do we do now" is going to be its own problem, but don't stop loving the craft over it.

Like a lot of other activities that got automated and done cheaper and faster by machines you may have to do writing and coding as a hobby. It's sort of sad but that's how technological progress always has worked.

I architect software and ship applications used by others daily. I want "AI" to write the software instead of doing it myself or delegating it to another developer. If you want to write your software yourself, by all means, go for it.