sintara

I really sympathize - but the truth also is that the vast majority of coding is commodity software production. "Process data from a website form" sort of stuff. I take your point that some coding is only possible when great minds go on open ended searches for novel approaches, but there's a limited subset of projects where that's a necessity.

I think this is a really meaningful insight. There's passion projects and there's - let's call it "industrial production".

Developers long had the privilege that what they were passionate about also aligned with what industries needed - at least somewhat. Then, outsourcing dev shops and later Claude and Codex turned code into industrial production. That doesn't mean we don't get to enjoy sipping a nice glass of wine and coding the 2D platformer we always wanted to exist - but it does mean that industrial production of code is less satisfying now.

The same is true for mathematicians and will be true for ever-increasing swaths of life. It's understandable to be sad about it and to miss the times when you were the mythical 10x coder with the super-high bus factor - but it is important to distinguish between activity oriented towards individual satisfaction and activity oriented towards outcomes, and not to allow the first to hinder the second.

I'm actually really excited about AI driven Gamedev. Imagine the next generation of Skyrim where rather than picking prewritten dialog options you can have natural conversations with NPCs.

Where rather than the - necessarily limited - set of predesigned outfit/equipment/face combinations each characters appearance can adjust to what happened to them. Their outfit changes with their commercial status, fights leave scars, having experienced tragedy leaves a haunted look.

Where rather than premodelled dungeons the world shapes around me to tell a story.

Gamedesign would change - and game artists would change from making 3D meshes, textures and animations to being authors of storylines and styles.

I really struggle to understand this discussion. Mathematics isn't a way to keep a specific kind of intellectual happy by providing fun, meaningless puzzles to solve in isolation. It's the bedrock of all other science. The goal is to find solutions and to advance the field - but we seem to be treating it like some sort of occupational therapy for bored geniuses.

As we solve lower level problems, we can unlock real world math solutions. Stellerator Design, Quantum error correction, Predictive superconductivity, Inverse protein and enzyme design - the list goes on. Many solutions AI can find can bring us closer to these - so let's fire up whatever datacenter we can find and get us to these outcomes.