hiprime

Hey Prime,

I wanted to share my discovery of your perspective on things, which led me into a mini existential crisis I had to work through.

Several months back, I stumbled across a YouTube short/video, and I very quickly realized I respected your opinions a lot. I’m a PO for a small FinTech company, and even though I talk to my .NET & Oracle PL/SQL devs on a daily basis, it felt like your understanding of “programming” was just another tier of skill and competence that I fell in love with.

However, as I started watching more and more of your content, I felt a lot of conflict on the topic of AI. I didn’t necessarily disagree with most of your statements or skepticism, but as I watched and listened to more of your stuff, I started to perceive AI criticisms as a personal issue.

I started vibe coding about a year ago with the original intent to learn and be able to make overall better technical requirements / tasks for my dev team. The “problem” was that I nearly immediately became more focused on the product and end result. Hearing your perspective on things eventually made me take a step back and go: “shit… I really don’t understand my code, or more specifically, know, how to create, edit, or delete anything without AI.”

I stopped “coding” for a few weeks entirely when I was confronted with a giant wall of code that I had established with my live website/project I had been working on for months.

As a PO, I questioned: “how much code should I understand or be able to write on my own?” “Should I even move forward without understanding the code?”

I felt the need to write this message, but then just let go of the idea and moved on. I started vibing again after stopping watching your content. I do appreciate a lot of your opinions, so it was bittersweet to tune in less, but it felt necessary…

Fast forward some time, I’m traveling down from Minnesota to Florida for work this week, and I’m sitting in the MSP terminal waiting for my layover / flight, when on Monday night, I see someone that I assume is you, based on appearance. But… I kind of freeze and watch for a bit, trying to mentally question: “is that Prime?” “Should I say hi?” “What else could I realistically say in an airport setting that would acknowledge my respect for you without being a follower nuisance type situation?”

Long story short, I fell in love with your content, went through a mini existential crisis, and then stopped listening and went back to vibe coding.

Knowing your background and skill set, I can understand some of the perspectives, but I also had to come to terms with the concept that I probably will never start coding “for real”. I strongly agree with a recent comment you made about AI fixing / creating individual pieces well but then layering complexity upon complexity.

However, my devs do this and so much worse. AI isn’t replacing a senior “engineer” anytime soon, but I personally can’t wait for it to replace incompetent developers who become shielded by management because their performance is too difficult to measure with standard KPIs and documentation under the guise of technical expertise. AI pushed me towards more product design elements but more importantly it motivated me and inspired me to just think and build in general.

Just wanted to share these thoughts as it related to you. I enjoy that the airport scenario led your YouTube algorithms back into my feed because I do appreciate and respect being able to hear you, I just have to balance out your “skeptic AI” personality that leads to my internal conflict I start to have.