Manuel Moreale’s latest post about AI was thought-provoking:

One thing I’m finding interesting is that I see people falling into two main camps for the most part. On one side are those who value output and outcome, and how to get there doesn’t seem to matter a lot to them. And on the other are the people who value the process over the result, those who care more about how you get to something and what you learn along the way.

I recently turned on the next level of AI assistence in my IDE. Previously I was using line auto-complete, which was quite good. This next level gives me something closer to Cursor: prompting the AI to generate full method implementations or having a chat interaction.

And I think I’m going to keep it on. One nice thing about this is that it’s on-demand: it stays out of the way, letting me implement something by hand if I want to. This is probably going to be the majority of the time, as I do enjoy the process of software creation.

But other times, I just want a capability added, such as marshalling and unmarshalling things to a database. In the past, this would largely be the code copied and pasted from another file. With the AI assistence, I can get this code generated for me. Of course I review it — I’m not vibe coding here — but it saves me from making a few subtle bugs and some pretty boring editing.

I guess my point is that I think these two camps are more porous then people think. There are times where the process is half the fun in making the thing, and others where it’s a slog, and you just want the thing to be. This is true for me in programming, and I can only guess that it’ll be similar in other forms of art. I guess the trap is choosing to join one camp, feeling that’s the only camp that people should be in, and refusing to recognise that others may feel differently.