{"slug": "the-meaning-of-life", "title": "The meaning of life", "summary": "Software engineers are rediscovering the importance of craftsmanship as AI tools like large language models threaten to automate coding, according to a personal essay by a research software engineer. The author argues that AI-generated code is derivative, unstable, and unlikely to be maintained, and that creation builds purpose, domain expertise, and real-world understanding. The essay concludes that building software by hand remains essential for personal fulfillment and effective problem-solving.", "body_md": "Creating something is a form of expression. You put a piece of yourself into it. Effort, time, but also a piece of your craftmanship and thinking about how something should ideally be. For many artists, the act of creating their art is so important that giving it up would give up an essential part of their being.\n\nThese days, software engineers are [rediscovering](https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/software-engineers-crisis-drown-ai-code) just how important [crafting](https://x.com/deedydas/status/2068238634600554699) software is to their identity. It has been true before that for many professional software engineers, their weekend hobby project was … creating software. For fun. It gives purpose to them to create something useful. Many times, the software is useful to exactly one person, and that’s okay.\n\nThe advent of large *text interpolators* has created a scare among those that deal with text-based work. It is now quite possible to recreate software “from scratch”, if one has a technical specification, and a test harness. There are a few misunderstandings, however.\n\n1): Firstly, such a reproduction is a **derivative work**, because the LLM has been trained on all of github, often including the specific code and thus interpolating copyrighted work rather than extrapolating.\n\n2) Secondly, reproducing someone else’s work with LLMs does not build the skill to adapt the work to new specifications. Yes, you can adjust the prompt, but as anyone who works with LLMs knows while it feels cool and fast, it is neither a stable nor efficient workflow, you have to edit code yourself as well. Earlier this year I “lost **control**” over a software repository by letting an LLM make too many edits, to the point where I was unfamilar with the code and could not debug the mess any longer. I had to backtrack, delete large parts, and with discipline, built by hand the complex code that is not interpolatable from LLM training data.\n\n3) Thirdly, I have serious doubts many AI-created software packages will still be **maintained** after a year. Interest of the “creators” is largely not long-term in the domain, but rather with the AI toys.\n\nI still have hope that there ultimately is a feedback loop of “Has this person delivered value?” Not, “Has this person appeared to have delivered value?”, not “Has this person done something trendy?” but looking back at the created change in the bottom line.\n\nFor me, there are three lessons:\n\n1) Creation gives purpose. From AI prompting pride in the creation cannot be generated, even if you give yourself titles like “Prompt engineer”. Effort is a key differentiating factor.\n\n2) Creation builds domain expertise. You can confidently argue about fine points. If you build with LLMs, your knowledge is shallow. Critical reading about a topic, including the background not directly relevant to a task at hand, is key here for retaining a big picture view of where a project should go.\n\n3) Computing and Society: Only by working and listening to people can you build something that matches a real need. One of the reasons why I departed from classical IT is that I felt many tools were built by software engineers for improving the lives of software engineers, but lacking a bigger goal. With AI, even if coding were to fall away as a skill, the skill to identify requirements through dialogs and embedding a solution with people remains an essential software engineering skill.\n\nI find research software engineering quite fulfilling. I build tools that are used by myself and my colleagues to investigate the Universe. I call them software telescopes. Could I find similar purpose in another domain? Probably. Could I find purpose in life without building something and putting my heart into it? Maybe not.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-meaning-of-life", "canonical_source": "https://blog.astrost.at/thoughts/the-meaning-of-life/", "published_at": "2026-08-13 08:19:09+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-24 22:13:49.237172+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["GitHub"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-meaning-of-life", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-meaning-of-life.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-meaning-of-life.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-meaning-of-life.jsonld"}}