The Cheap Version of Yourself

It was a regular Sunday morning, the rain was pouring quite heavily. I woke up at around 10am that day. I got up, opened my laptop, and started to work on my side hustle.

There it was, a 2 hour vibe coding session. Created a full interactive Drive Folio from scratch.

Did I write a single line of code? Nope. The AI did all the work.

Did I have the adequate knowledge to utilize three.js? Nope. I only took inspiration from Bruno Simon’s.

I was once proud of my thinking and analyzing process, I was once proud of the quality I was able to deliver, I was once proud of who I was. Who I was becoming.

But now, I’m not even sure if I could still deliver the same quality, I’m not even sure if I’m still the same person. I’m not even sure if I could still grow as I was growing.

So let’s be real here, what did AI actually give you? For me, it was speed, as long as you know how to prompt it, anything can be delivered with almost the same quality. But what did it take from me?

Everything

The person who was becoming, the person who was proud of his art, the person who wanted to grow his wings. But all of this is not possible anymore, because my art is starting to become irrelevant, I’m starting to not enjoy the process anymore. The company now requires engineers to work 10x faster, delivering 10x more features. Whether we want it or not, we must use AI. Even my own brain doesn’t want to think as hard as before, I just want to finish my work and lie in bed, play games, doomscroll the internet.

The output is the same, it’s almost impossible to tell whether it was written by human or AI. The output was never the problem, the output is just a byproduct of you. But it will never make me grow.

A couple weeks ago, I was assigned to a task. We need to rewrote the whole management dashboard UI and pages to a new more clean UI/UX. I was a bit surprised when i saw this, and the timeline given? 1 week. We have about 20-30 pages and each page has multiple forms, drawers, modals, etc. I thought to my self, How could i do this in a week? So as my strategy, i aggressively utilize AI. Maxing all available tokens per day. And whoala, there it was, a completed management dashboard, with the same quality, maybe 70-80%, as before.

The stakeholders are happy, the boss mentioned my name, congratulating me for finishing it on time. And it felt.. empty. I wasn’t proud of it. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t anything. But now, I prefer my “cheap” version, because it pay bills, and pleases everybody. It’s lower friction, higher reward. the values shifts.

And the worst part? I didn’t notice. While the boss was congratulating me, I wasn’t thinking “I’m being hollowed out.” I was thinking “I’m crushing it.” That’s the trick the drift plays on you. It doesn’t announce itself. The part of you that would have caught it on Monday has already been outsourced by Friday. By the time you sit down weeks later, on a Sunday morning, to write something honest about what’s happening, you don’t know how long it’s been happening. You don’t know what’s left.

By the time i wrote this essay, I have completly relied on AI to product my professional work. Even my hobbies side hustle. The part of me that i enjoyed, has been outsourced by LLM.

Most AI discussions I see nowadays are just a bunch of code slop and bugs created in the system. But no one talks about its real impacts. The residues that we humans are created of. I believe we are a residue of our past self. We are exactly what we were, a fraction of our past, the struggles that we went through, the struggle that doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. But in the world of AI, all of these residues are no more. We are not made up of residues anymore, we got the finished products in seconds.

Adulthood is a residue of our past struggles, wins, and losses. Without those experiences, we would not be who we are today. We learn and we grow through struggles. But what happens when all these struggles are gone? Are we even the same person anymore?

Other arguments are saying, isn’t AI just a tool? Just like every other tool, calculator, smartphone, Google, Wikipedia, etc? No. Those tools remove the labor of work, not the practice of thought itself. AI practically removes the process of struggle, core essence of creating an idea is through a struggle. Through a dead end. That’s not labor. That’s where we grow, our residues that make us, us.

So you think, it’s only a matter of time, before we adapt and become a better version of ourselves, creating new things with AI. But that’s where the illusion kicks in. Did you ever realize that, AI is becoming better and better and we are becoming more and more lazy? I surely do feel so, how could I not? I used to code for 8 hours a day, now I just code for 2 hours and the rest of the time I’m just waiting for AI to finish my work. Or just wait for the limit to reset, so I can use the premium models again.

If an AI could do this for you and you’d be content with the result, you’re probably not doing it for the result.

So what am I becoming? What am I doing to prevent this? Should it even be prevented? I don’t know, and I’m scared. I wrote this blog, using my own words, rewrote it a couple of times. Even still, I don’t have the confidence to release it without consulting an LLM.

I just hope I don’t become a cheap version of myself.

Do you?