this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2026
77 points (91.4% liked)

Programming

28593 readers
465 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hello everyone! For many years, I have been coding every once in a while and actually learned a lot. I especially liked C and C-Like languages and building useless stuff just for fun and for the sake of the intellectual challenge that came with it, but since when AI became decent enough, it just kinda ruined the passion for programming and computers as a whole. Thing is, I am in university now and need to go back to using C and program regularly, but now that AI does everything 20000 times better than I ever will I always either cede to temptation to use it (thus nullifying learning) or just get bored so quickly I just turn off the computer to do something different.

is there a way to revive the interest for programming and building projects? I am doing my best to stop using AI but heck I really am self-indulging. please help!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It is known that, with effort, a person can improve from the level they are in university

It is not known how much AI can be improved

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev -2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It is not known how much AI can be improved

I didn't say it was. But at this point it would be a pretty wild prediction to think it's not going to continue to rapidly improve.

[–] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Is it a wild thing to predict that AI improvement will slow down?

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A few reasons:

  1. The evidence so far seems to be that AI capability scales with compute, and compute continues to advance. Including with crazy AI hardware like Cerebras and Taalas. There are still a ton of AI hardware startups that have yet to tape out.
  2. There's an enormous amount of research into algorithmic and infrastructure improvements, which also show no signs of slowing down.
  3. Empirically, it has been getting better continuously for several years now. There appears to be no reason to suspect any blockers.

In other words: why not?

To steel man, the main reasons I would counter with are:

  1. Moore's law is pretty much dead... Except that we still have a ton of headroom with custom AI-focused chips. E.g. I know of at least two startups working on DRAM stacked on the compute chip instead of next to it, which gives dramatically higher memory bandwidth.
  2. There are still a couple of architectural issues, e.g. context length is limited, AI can't really remember/learn things on-line, hallucination is not solved. But... in practice those problems seem to not matter too much and also hallucinations seem less common the more capable the model is, so maybe it doesn't need an architectural solution at all.
[–] agentlangdon@infosec.pub 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

"dram stacked on the compute chip" is the amd x3d design which has been out for gaming PCs for years now.

The rest of your statements seem clueless and completely based on AI company marketing.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago

amd x3d design which has been out for gaming PCs for years now.

That's SRAM, not DRAM. But sure, I'm the clueless one.