Do experiences matter?

I work in tech and write for a lot of tech companies, so many of the voices I hear chattering away online are also people who work in tech.

And it’s kind of starting to feel like a lot of people don’t really… care about experiencing things for themselves anymore? Like, running tests and doing experiments, trying new things, playing around, tinkering, learning hard skills, doing something poorly to learn how to do it, doing something just for the thrill of it — 

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, or maybe I’m just becoming old-woman-yelling-at-cloud.

But there’s just so much emphasis on how much you can do and get done with AI and so little emphasis on how rewarding and satisfying it can be to do something yourself. It almost feels like the whole point is switching from doing something to having something done.

For example:

• “Vibe coding” is replacing “I learned some code to make this funky little tracker on my website that looks bad but I’m really proud of.”
• Fancy AI “forecasting” dashboards are replacing running experiments yourself to see firsthand what works and doesn’t.
• Using AI to “spar” with you on your latest essay is replacing the tinkering-around-with-the-sentences-myself-until-I-figure-out-what-I-really-wanted-to-say.
• Having AI generate an image for you is replacing just going out and using the $1000 camera in your pocket to take a photo yourself.

Not that these use cases are universally bad — I love a good dashboard and computers are typically pretty good (better than me anyway) at analyzing large datasets.

But thinking about it from a content perspective:

The coolest stuff to read is (usually) some kind of first-hand experience: What did you do? What happened? How did it feel? Where’d you get that idea? How’d you make that possible? What parts were hard? How did you get through it? Did you reach your goal?

And it’s kind of sad to me to think that folks might be just as happy to flatten all of that to get to the final product faster — or are just happy enough to experience things vicariously through AI, or automation, or whatever doing the “work” for them, so they can skip to the “results.”

To each their own, I guess.

But for me, I like experiencing things for myself, even if they’re hard, and getting to feel and experience whatever comes with it.