Bare minds

Back in the Stone Age, humanity was just scraping by with not much more than our bare hands. Working with AI has showed me that, all this time: we've just been scraping by with our bare minds. If computers were meant to be bicycles for the mind, then AI is jetpacks for the mind.

I've been using Cursor for programming recently, and it has changed my life. I wouldn't go back to programming with my bare mind. If you haven't tried it out you should try it.

If you've tried GitHub Copilot and didn't like it, try Cursor. Cursor feels like it is paying attention to what you're trying to do and helping you accomplish it, whereas Copilot feels like it gets its mind reset with every keystroke and is just suggesting code based on what is immediately in front of it with no wider appreciation of what you're doing.

But I started trying to write a blog post in Cursor because I thought it might help with that too, and wow, it is annoying. It keeps popping up suggestions for what it thinks I want to write! Not only is it wrong about what I wanted to write, but it's corrupting my mind with thoughts that I didn't want to have! I had to stop and revert to vim.

I consider myself a programmer first and a writer second. (And not even second). So why is it that I'm so much more picky about my words than my code? If I'm a programmer first, shouldn't my code be a truer expression of my spirit than my words are? Shouldn't it be more upsetting to have the machine desecrate my code than my words?

And I'm not even that picky about my words! My blog posts are more like a stream of consciousness than a highly-crafted written artifact. But somehow it is very important to me that it's a stream of my consciousness.

Maybe when I'm programming I'm just a lot more pragmatic about it. I just want to get stuff done as expediently as possible. Whereas when I'm writing a blog post I actually am recording a true expression of my spirit.

So maybe when people find they don't like using Cursor for programming, it's because they are accustomed to putting a true expression of their spirit into their code. And of course we can argue about whether that is a productive way to work, but programming is more than just work, and the idea of putting a true expression of spirit into code is attractive. Maybe I should make time to do more of that sort of programming, with the focus on the love of the craft rather than the end result.

And maybe professional writers are happy to have ChatGPT do all of their writing, and then they go home and program BBC Micros in assembly language just for fun.

CNC machine

The post I started writing was going to be about my CNC machine, because it is finished and working now.

But that post was going to be boring, and thinking about AI is fun.

In lieu of the CNC machine post, here's a clip of the machine working: