I’m making an iOS app [1] that allows you to track and analyze your life. It’s all local to your device and was created to help me learn more about myself and my habits.
My experience is that it is much more terse and realistic with its feedback, and more thoughtful generally. I trust its positive acknowledgements of my work more than claude, whose praise I have been trained to be extremely skeptical of.
The language you use to describe this is fun, I make an app for self tracking called Reflect and would love your opinion of it, even if it doesnt suit your needs exactly.
I’ve worked in robotics before. Since you mentioned backend I think getting familiar with ROS and LCM and other middleware would be helpful to you. If you have spare time, you could play around with writing drivers for motors that you buy, but it’s less specific to your skill set which in my opinion probably consists of sending and ingesting data, especially event-based systems.
I think in the workplace this is true, and a bummer, because the workplace demands the benefits that AI augmented programming offers. As a hobby, though, like music, the need for productivity isn’t as high and you can go to the proverbial practice room and program.
Overall I think you have a good point and the bummer for me is that the practice room isn’t as available for the day job.
I think AI is posing a challenge to people like the person in TFA because programming is their hobby and one that they’re good at. They aren’t used to knowing someone or something can do it better and knowing that now makes them wonder what the point is. I argue that amateur artists and musicians have dealt with this feeling of “someone can always do it better” for a very long time. You can have fun while knowing someone else can make it better than you, faster, without as much struggle. Programmers aren’t as used to this feeling because, even though we know people like John Carmack exist, it doesn’t fly in your face quite like a beautiful live performace or painted masterpiece does. Learning to enjoy your own process is what I think is key to continuing what you love. Or, use it as an opportunity to try something else — but you’ll eventually discover the same thing no matter what you do. It’s very rare to be the best at something.
An app called Reflect to run self experiments, to prove your new habit or supplement is doing what you want, or to get to the bottom of what relationship your mood has with your lifestyle changes: