Fighting Technology

I latched onto a line in Keith Richards’s autobiography, Life, because it overlaps with a lot of my current feelings about, well, stuff.

I always felt that I was actually fighting technology, that it was no help at all.

That’s how I’ve felt trying to work alongside coding LLMs. My experience is that I spend as much time correcting AI-generated code than the amount of time it saves me from writing it. It could very well be that one negates the other and it’s all a wash, but that’s a best-case scenario in these early days. The point is less about how much time things take than it is about a new fight with technology.

I’m not going to say that AI-generated code is no help at all. But I can see how it could be in less proficient hands, for sure. I get what Keith is saying and it jives with my work these days.

Keith doesn’t stop there. Check this out:

Then the bass player would be battened off, so they were all in their little pigeonholes and cubicles. And you’re playing in this enormous room and not using any of it. This idea of separation is the total antithesis of rock and roll, which is a bunch of guys in a room making a sound and just capturing it.

Damn dude, can’t you just picture that? You have a large recording room but in actuality, you’re looking at a space divided into functional cubicles. That’s to the prevent the sound of instruments leaking into other instruments.

Or, in CSS terms:

.sound {
  overflow: clip;
}

Sorry, had to go there. But doesn’t that picture remind you of the days when everyone specialized in their own area of web development? You might have a designer creating static mockups in Photoshop, one developer who builds it on the front end, and another sorta “back end” fella called a webmaster. I’m glad those days are over.

Are they, though? Because, as I see it, there’s merely more ways of classifying folks by where they sit in the stack. There’s collaboration, sure, but we’re still drawing divisions between ourselves.

Speaking of collaboration:

It’s the sound they make together, not separated. This mythical bullshit about stereo and high tech and Dolby, it’s just totally against the grain of what music should be.

Yes, this. Regardless of how we categorize our work, it’s the code we write, share, and riff on together that creates bigger and better things. That’s the grain of an open, de-centralized web. It’s less about the individual pieces we wire together than about what we create when putting our ideas together.

That’s where I believe that modern technology runs against the grain of what web design and development should be: weird.

Moving right along:

It was these guys that made records in one room with three microphones. They weren’t recording every snitch of the drums or the bass. They were recording the room. You can’t get these indefinable things by stripping it apart.

Oh man, this is where my mind exploded! Imagine if the web development field was positioned not by isolationist terms like individual contributor but by what evolves when we put our minds together. Because:

The enthusiasm, the spirit, the soul, whatever you want to call it, where’s the microphone for that?

Total mic drop. But not before we throw a little shade on technology’s failed attempts to make “better” records:

The records could have been a lot better in the ’80s if we’d cottoned on to that earlier and not been led by the nose by technology.

And perhaps we’ll be saying the same thing about websites built in the 2020s, like we already do about websites created in the 2010s.