There's DeWALT, Craftsman, Stanley, etc carpentry/mechanic power tool brands who make a wide variety of all manner of tools and tooling; the equivalents in computers (at least UNIXy) are coreutils (fileutils, shellutils, and textutils), netpbm, sed, awk, the contents of /usr/bin, and all their alternative, updated brands like fd, the silver searcher, and ripgrep are, or the progression of increased sharpening in revision control tools from rcs, sccs, svn, to mercurial and git; or telnet-ssh, rcp-rsync, netcat-socat. Even perl and python qualify as multi-tool versions of separate power tools. I'd even include language compilers and interpreters in general as extremely sharp and powerful power multi-tools, the machine shop that lets you create more power tools. When you use these, you're working with your hands.
GenAI is none of that, it's not a power tool, even though it can use power tools or generate output like the above power tools do. GenAI is hiring someone else to build a bird house or a spice rack, and then saying you had a hand in the results. It's asking the replicator for "tea, earl grey, hot". It's like how we elevate CEOs just because they're the face of the company, as if they actually did the work and were solely responsible for the output. There's skill in organization and direction, not all CEOs get undeserved recognition, but it's the rare CEO who's getting their hands dirty creating something or some process, power tools or not. GenAI lets you, everyone, be the CEO.
Why else do you think I go to work everyday? Because I have a “passion” for sitting at a computer for 40 hours a week to enrich private companies bottom line or a SaaS product or a LOB implementation? It’s not astroturfing - it’s realistic
Would you be happier if I said I love writing assembly language code by hand like I did in 1986?
GenAI is none of that, it's not a power tool, even though it can use power tools or generate output like the above power tools do. GenAI is hiring someone else to build a bird house or a spice rack, and then saying you had a hand in the results. It's asking the replicator for "tea, earl grey, hot". It's like how we elevate CEOs just because they're the face of the company, as if they actually did the work and were solely responsible for the output. There's skill in organization and direction, not all CEOs get undeserved recognition, but it's the rare CEO who's getting their hands dirty creating something or some process, power tools or not. GenAI lets you, everyone, be the CEO.