Amazon tried do automate ordering, so people didn’t have to browse the catalog, with things like the Dash. This was also the goal of Alexa too, but almost no one does it. This failed, I think because people don’t trust it. Amazon has too many items that are just weird, or the price is sky high for some inexplicable reason. There is too much variability to trust AI and a voice assistant. It would require so much back and forth that it is easier just of browse manually.
I read Google was building AI into their shopping experience. I don’t use Google, so I’m not sure if this has actually rolled out. In many ways I would liken this to telling a family member that I was “an alarm clock” for my birthday, then trusting they will get something I like. That requires me to either not care about the details, or to trust that family member knows me well and shares my taste. I don’t feel that way about AI.
I agree. (And believe me, I don’t enjoy fooling myself into believing a better outcome than can be expected.) so far my experience is that AI assistants are a tremendous help, but it still feels like programming and still needs a programmer to drive it.
The site would then be providing information to the AI, without and means of generating revenue to keep going. Where is the incentive for commercial sites to play this game?
This came up years ago with the Google Answer Box. People were pretty upset that Google wasn’t sending people to the actual websites anymore and just scraping the relevant content. It was seen stealing potential ad revenue from the author who did the work to put the information out on the internet.
I haven’t heard a lot of talk about out about this with LLM, even though they are like the Google Answer Box on steroids. What I’ve heard more is the general talk of IP theft during training.
> the majority of people on this platform have access now to something that renders solo/small team projects much, much more plausible -> so, where are they?
I question the sales pitch from these AI companies, because this isn’t happening.
The AI built projects that are posted feel very much like AI toy projects.
The only real interesting thing I’ve seen so far was Glaze from a couple days ago, from the Raycast people. Though it does make me a bit worried about the future.
I understand where you are coming from but this is the primary misunderstanding - AI doesn't do anything on its own, if you have an AI 100% do something, that will likely suck. AI is a tool, a resource, and something that you can outsource all the tedious and monotonous stuff to.
Its also incredibly helpful if you dont know what you are doing. You can learn from an AI.
My biggest project I've used AI for was a book of poetry. AI can't write poetry very well at all - I don't think that I used a single AI written line (I had notebooks filled with writings from over the years) but in general I had absolutely no idea how to write poetry - I know exactly how to write it now - like as if I went to school for exactly that.
AI is also a better researcher than most people, so everyone ought to be using AI for search 100%.
I had 3 startups back in the day, none of them took off - I have not done any web development in over a decade, I'm in the early stages of starting a project that I should not be able to do and yet I am planning on doing it.
I spent the last 2 days primarily using Claude instead of coding things myself at work. I felt the exact opposite way. It was so unfulfilling. I’d equate it to the feeling of getting an A on a test, knowing I cheated. I didn’t accomplish anything. I didn’t learn anything. I got the end result with none of the satisfaction and learned nothing in the process.
I’m probably going to go back and redo everything with my own code.
That's interesting. I have been thinking about how the vastly different reactions people seem to have to agentic coding could be influenced by what they value about coding. To me it seems like there are three joys in coding:
1. Creating something
2. Solving puzzles
3. Learning new things
If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product of some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent. You can get an output so much quicker.
If your enjoyment comes from solving hard puzzles, digging into algorithms, how hardware works, weird machine quirks, language internals etc... then you're going to lose nearly all of that fun.
And learning new things is somewhere in the middle. I do think that you can use agentic coding to learn new technologies. I have found llms to be a phenomenal tool for teaching me things, exploring new concepts, and showing me where to go to read more from human authors. But I have to concede that the best way to learn is by doing so you will probably lose out on some depth and stickiness if you're not the one implementing something in a new technology.
Of course most people find joy in some mix of all three. And exactly what they're looking for might change from project to project. I'm curious if you were leaning more towards 2 and 3 in your recent project and that's why you were so unsatisfied with Claude Code.
I'll add "craftsmanship". It isn't just delivering "A" finished product, you want to deliver a "good", if not "the best", finished product.
I guess if you're in an iterative MVP mindset then this matters less, but that model has always made me a little queasy. I like testing and verifying the crap out of my stuff so that when I hand it off I know it's the best effort I could possibly give.
Relying on AI code denies me the deep knowledge I need to feel that level of pride and confidence. And if I'm going to take the time to read, test and verify the AI code to that level, then I might as well write most of it unless it's really repetitive.
I don't think AI coding means you stop being a craftsman. It is just a different tool. Manual coding is a hand tool, AI coding is a power tool. You still retain all of the knowledge and as much control over the codebase as you want, same with any tool.
It's a different conversation when we talk about people learning to code now though. I'd probably not recommend going for the power tool until you have a solid understanding of the manual tools.
It can be a power tool if used in a limited capacity, but I'd describe vibe-coding as sending a junior construction worker out to finish a piece of framing on his own.
Will he remember to use pressure treated lumber? Will he use the right nails? Will he space them correctly? Will the gaps be acceptable? Did he snort some bath salts and build a sandcastle in a corner for some reason?
All unknowns and you have to over-specify and play inspector. Maybe that's still faster than doing it yourself for some tasks, but I doubt most vibe-coders are doing that. And I guess it doesn't matter for toy programs that aren't meant for production, but I'm not wired to enjoy it. My challenge is restraining myself from overengineering my work and wasting time on micro-optimizations.
You can use (and create) tools to codify what you think of as "quality".
There's the new frontier for delivering good or the best products. Less relying on the feels of an experienced programmer and more configuring and creating deterministic tools to define quality.
Unless you get actual joy and enjoyment from writing 42 unit tests for a CRUD API with slight variations for each test. Then go ahead =)
> I'll add "craftsmanship". It isn't just delivering "A" finished product, you want to deliver a "good", if not "the best", finished product.
I don't raise a single PR that I feel I wouldn't have written myself. All the code written by the AI agent must be high quality and if it isn't, I tell it why and get it to write bits again, or I just do it myself.
I'm having quite a hard time understanding why this is a problem for other people using AI. Can you help me?
If you take the time to read the code and understand it to that level, great. But that sort of belies the promise of vibe-coding, where all software engineers essentially become PMs to a bunch of agents.
I use AI to extract information from documentation and write me bespoke examples, but I'd never feel good relying on code it actually generated without extremely thorough testing and review.
> If you take the time to read the code and understand it to that level, great. But that sort of belies the promise of vibe-coding, where all software engineers essentially become PMs to a bunch of agents.
But why would I do vibe coding? I am releasing this code to production systems that will bring the company down if there is a significant error. And my human peers will give me hell for raising terrible code for review.
I have a helpful, endlessly patient junior engineer with superhuman typing speed who will take all of my advice and apply it exactly as a I want it, and write my code for me. When I see errors, I'll tell it, and I'll even ask it to remember why it is a problem in our code base (maybe not others). So it has memory and (mostly) won't do that again.
And I also make sure to apply the same quality to the tests we write together.
Over the last few months I'd say between 50-80% of code being delivered to our repo is "typed" by agents. Humans are still guiding them and ensuring the quality meets our high standards.
I don't really have a grasp on how other people are working with this stuff that they're seeing problems with production code.
That's a really good point. And I agree that kind of confidence in craftsmanship is something that's missing from agentic coding today... it does make slop if you're not careful with it. Even though I've learned how to guide agents, I still have some uneasiness about missing something sloppy they have done.
But then it makes me ask if the agents will get so good that craftsmanship is a given? Then that concern goes away. When I use Go I don't worry too much about craftsmanship of the language because it was written by a lot of smart people and has proven itself to be good in production for thousands of orgs. Is there a point at which agents prove themselves capable enough that we start trusting in their craftsmanship? There's a long way to go, but I don't think that's impossible.
I would argue that craftsmanship includes a thorough understanding and cognitive model of the code. And, as far as I understand it, these agents are syntactic wonders but can not really understand anything. Which would preclude any sort of craftsmanship, even if what they make happens to be well-built.
I think I'd add a #4 to this list, and that's helping people. I like making things that people can use to make their life easier. That's probably my number one.
The "creating something" idea... That's more complex. With agentic coding something can be created, but did I create it? Using agentic coding feels like hiring someone to do the work for me. For example, I just had all the windows in my house replaced. A crew came out at did it. The job is done, but I didn't do anything and felt no pride or sense of accomplishment in having these new windows. It just happened. Contrast that to a slow drain I had in my bathroom. I took the pipes apart, found the blockage, cleared it out, and reassembled the drain. When I next used the sink and the water effortlessly flowed away, I felt like I accomplished something, because I did it, not some plumber I hired.
So it isn't even about learning or solving puzzles, it's about being the person who actually did the work and seeing the result of that effort.
Yes! Good points! I think what I meant for point 1 was more "outputting something" vs "creating something". In my mind that encompasses materializing something into the world to achieve whatever you wanted, whether you were aiming to help others, solve a problem you alone have, or scratch some other sort of itch. It's about achieving some end. And helping somebody can be achieved indirectly and still be satisfying.
The inherent value of creating is something I was missing. Solving puzzles might be part of that, but not all. It's the classic Platonic question about how we value actions: for their own sake, for their results, or for both.
I think we agree that coding can be both, and it sounds like you feel the value for its own sake is lackluster in agentic coding -- It's just too easy. And I think that's the core sliding scale: Do you value creation more for its own sake or for its results? Where you land on that spectrum probably influences how people feel about agentic coding.
That being said, I also think that agentic coding can give enough of a challenge to scratch the itch of intrinsic value of creating. To a certain degree I think it's about moving up the abstraction chain to work more on architecture and product design. Those things can be fun and rewarding too. But fundamentally it's a preference.
It's kind of a weird thing. I spent 2 days working one some code, which in a way was the process of working out the requirements and functionality that was required. I then told Claude to look at it in and refactor it.
I did put in 2 days of work to come up with what Claude used to ultimately do what it did... but when I look at the resulting code, I feel nothing. Having the idea isn't the same as being the one who actually did the thing. I plan to delete the branch next week. I don't want to maintain what it did, and think it should be less complex than it made it.
I can see where this idea is coming from, but I don't agree with the conclusion at all. As someone who loves solving puzzles and learning new things, AI has been a godsend. I also very much like creating things, but even more than that, I like doing all three at once.
I think of AI like a microdose of Speed Force. Having super speed doesn't mean you don't like running; it just means you can run further and more often. That in turn justifies a greater amount of time spent running.
Without the Speed Force, most of the time you were reliant on vehicles (i.e. paying for third-party solutions) to get where you needed to go. With the Speed Force, not only can you suddenly meet a lot more of your transportation needs by foot, you're able to run to entirely new destinations that you'd never before considered. Eventually, you may find yourself planning trips to yet unexplored faraway harsh terrains.
If your joy in running came from attempting to push your biological physical limits, maybe you hate the Speed Force. If you enjoy spending time running and navigating unfamiliar territory, the Speed Force can give you more of that.
Sure, there are also oddballs who don't know how to run, yet insist on using the Speed Force to awkwardly jump somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of their destination. No one's saying they don't exist, but that's a completely different crowd from experienced speedsters.
My experiences are not universal but apart from hardware and maybe $10 for a VPS for hosting, I do not find the need to pay for third-party solutions; I quite like this situation, and I do not find myself particularly constrained taking a little extra time or having to think a bit harder. But, my friend, I must ask, what are LLMs if not third-party solutions with sizable expenditures?
You may be an exception, but most businesses and many individuals pay for a laundry list of commercial software products. If you count non-monetary forms of payment (i.e. data and/or attention to ads), that expands to virtually everyone with access to a computer.
> If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product of some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent
As someone who enjoys technology, and using it, and can just barely sort-of code but really not, agentic coding must be wonderful. I have barely scratched the surface with a couple of scripts. But simply translating "here's what I want, and how I would have done it the last time I used Linux 20 years ago, show me how to do it with systemd" is so much easier than digging through years of forum posts and trying to make sure they haven't all been obsoleted.
None of it is new. None of it is fancy. I do regret that people aren't getting credit for their work, but "automount this SMB share from my NAS" isn't going to make anyone's reputation. It's just going to make my day easier. I really did learn enough to set up a NAT system to share a DSL connection with an office in the late 1990s on OpenBSD. It took a long time, and I don't have that kind of free time anymore. I will never git gud. It's this, or just be another luser who goes without.
I'm squarely into #1, but it usually requires #2 (at a high level) and has #3 as a side effect. But there's also #0 which kicks it all off: the triggering problem/question.
Like just yesterday I started to notice the increasing pressure of an increasingly hard-to-navigate number of Claude chats. So I went searching for something to organize them. I did find an extension, but it's for Chrome, and I'm a Firefox person, so I had Claude look at it with the initial idea of porting to Firefox. Then in the analysis, Claude mentioned creating an extension from scratch, and that's what I went for.
I've never really used JavaScript, let alone created a Firefox extension before, but in a few minutes I was iterating on one, figuring out how I wanted it to work with Claude, and now I have a very nice and featureful chats organizer. And I haven't even peeked at the code. I also now have a firm idea of this general spec of how I want arbitrary list-organizing UI to look+behave going forward.
I think your comment really captures some of the reasons behind the differences between people’s reactions to Claude pretty well.
I will add though, on 2 and 3, during most of the coding I do in my day job as a staff engineer, it’s pretty rare for me to encounter deeply interesting puzzles and really interesting things to learn. It’s not like I’m writing a compiler or and OS kernel or something; this is web dev and infra at a mid sized company. For 95% of coding tasks I do I’ve seen some variation already before and they are boring. It’s nice to have Claude power through them.
On system design and architecture, the problems still tend to be a bit more novel. I still learn things there. Claude is helpful, but not as helpful as it is for the code.
I do get the sense that some folks enjoy solving variations of familiar programming puzzles over and over again, and Claude kills that for them. That’s not me at all. I like novelty and I hate solving the same thing twice. Different tastes, I guess.
I find there are still opportunities to solve puzzles. Claude Code might build something in an unsatisfying or inelegant way, and you can suggest a better approach. You can absolutely write core components — the fun parts you crave — of the code and give it to an LLM to flesh out the rest.
One of the recent joys I’ve had is having CC knit together separate notebooks I’d been updating for a couple of years into a unified app. It can be a fulfilling experience.
The creator of OpenClaw had a great line about this:
"If your identity is tied to you being an iOS developer, you are going to have a rough time. But if your identity is 'I'm a builder!' it is a very exciting time to be alive."
Plus, there is no rule that says you can't keep coding if it's faster for you and/or it's quicker in general. e.g I can write a Perl one liner much faster than Claude can. Heck, even if it's not faster and you enjoy coding, just keep coding.
I built a house. Ok, I said an architect what I want and he showed me the plans and I gave him feedback for adjustments and then the plans were given to the construction crew and they built the actual house.
Curious about that reasoning : where do you draw the line ?
Are you a builder if there is an middleman ? If not, what if the middleman is a tool ? If you use autocad to build the plans, are you still a builder ? What if autocad has a prompt feature, are you still a builder ?
If you actually do something that is considered building.
Same with vibe coding, if you don’t write code you just ordered and didn’t code, otherwise all my customers and bosses where coders long before AI because there orders don’t reach much different from today’s prompts. The recipient changed but that doesn’t change the sender.
It’s some kind of Chinese Room but this time for those outside the room.
This past week I found and fixed a bug that happens once in 40,000 transactions working with Claude Code - Opus 4.6. Our legacy app was designed around 2008 and has had zillions of band aids added since then. Nobody (~700 person company) has been able to reliably reproduce this issue to confidently claim that they know what the cause is and how to definitively fix it. That all changed yesterday. I spent today writing up summaries that were shared far and wide. My wizard status is yet again renewed.
I'm a few years younger than the OP, but I remember the early Internet days. I started with Perl CGI scripts, ASP, even some early server side JS, in the form of Netscape Livewire.
Over the past couple months, I've created several applications with Claude Code. Personal projects that would've taken me weeks, months, or possibly forever, since I generally get distracted and move on to something else. I write pretty decent specs, break things into phases, and make sure each phase is solid before moving on to the next.
I have Claude build things in frameworks I would've never tried myself, just because it can. I do actually look at the code. Some of it is slop. In a few cases, it looks like it works, but it'll be a totally naive or insecure implementation. If I really don't like how it did something, I'll revert and give it another attempt. I also have other AIs review it and make suggestions.
It's fun, but I ultimately gain little intellectual satisfaction from it. It's not like the old days at all. I don't feel like I'm growing my skill set. Yes, I learned "something", but it's more about the capabilities of AI, not the end result.
Still, I'm convinced this is the future. Experienced developers are in the best position to work with AI. We also may not have a choice.
I disagree. I need to be able to support what I ship and answer to the details of what it does and why it does it. I can only truly do that if I write it myself.
There should also be a symbiotic relationship at a job. Yes, they get something from me, but I should also get something… learning and some amount of satisfaction… in addition to the paycheck. I can get a paycheck anywhere.
It’s not the “new norm” unless employees accept it as the new normal. I don’t know why anyone would accept a completely one-sided situation like that.
> I need to be able to support what I ship and answer to the details of what it does and why it does it. I can only truly do that if I write it myself.
How do you function on a team, where you have to maintain code others have written?
We talk to each other. If someone wrote something I don't understand, I defer to them. If someone wrote something who is no longer with the company, we trying to make sense of it, and in some cases end up re-writing some things.
There are only 3 or 4 of us working on most of the code I touch. 3 of us have worked together in some form or another for close to 20 years.
That's where you're wrong. AI can debug code better than humans. I put it on a task that I'd spent months on: debugging a distributed application which had random errors which required me to comb through MBs of logs. I gave Claude the task, a log parser (which it also wrote), and told it to find what each issue was. It did the job in a few minutes. This is a task that was, frankly, just a bit above my capacity with a human brain as it required associating lots of logs by timestamps trying to reconstruct what the heck was going on.
My new worry is that I need to make sure the code AI is writing is more comprehensible not to other humans, but to other AIs in the future, since there's very little chance humans will be doing the debugging by themselves given how bad we are at that compared to LLMs even now, let alone in a few years.
> but I should also get something
What do you want beyond a pay check? If you want to get better at your job, the most important technique you can improve right now is hands down how to interact with an AI to solve business problems. The learning you're thinking of, being able to fully understand code and actually debug it in your head, is already a thing of the past now. In a few years, no one will seriously consider building software that's not entirely AI-written except for enthusiasts, similar to the people currently participating in C obfuscated code competitions. I say this as someone who reluctantly started using AI in anger only a few months ago after hating on it before that for the laughable code it was producing just around 6 months ago (it probably was already good by then but I was not really giving it a chance yet).
When it comes to writing code, I can almost tell before writing code that whether this particular piece of code will be intellectually stimulating to me. If so, I write it myself without thinking about whether Claude might have done it faster. If not, I let Claude write it. Currently I'd estimate maybe 70% of the code falls in the first category, and the remaining 30% is something I would've used a lot of my own willpower to get started anyways.
Also, when I write code myself, I still ask Claude to review it. It's faster than asking a human colleague to review it, so you can have Claude review often. Just today after a five-minute review Claude said a piece of code I wrote had four bugs, three of which were hallucinations and one was a real bug. I honestly do think it would have taken me a bit more than five minutes to find that one real bug.
I had a similar feeling trying to calculate some combinatorial structures. At some point the LLM made a connection to extremal combinatorics and calculated tighter bounds and got me to the solution faster.
Felt flashbacks of playing chess against humans online as a teen by copying moves from a chess engine.
Then you haven't had any exciting idea and the need to actually build it. I personally like thinking of different projects and come up with ideas to make them unique. With Claude Code you can iterate like you're on steroids.
I'm going to say something people hate... you're probably holding it wrong. Why do I say that? Because I absolutely felt exactly the way you are feeling. In fact, it can be worse than unfulfilling, it can be even draining.
But I, over time, changed how I used LLMs and I actually now find it rewarding and I'm learning a huge amount. I've learned more technologies (and I do mean learn) in the last year than I have ever in the past.
I think my advice is that if it feels wrong then you shouldn't be doing it that way. But that isn't inherent in using LLMs to help you work. Everyone has different preferences for how they work (and what languages they like, etc). The people using 15 LLMs to build software probably love that but I don't think that's how I want to do it. And that's fine.
You're paid by a company to create software, so they can use it to drive business value and make a profit. You did so effortlessly. But it didn't make you feel personally fulfilled. So you're going to go back and re-do it, so you feel better?
How do you think your company's CEO is going to feel when you tell them you could be finishing the software much faster, but you'd rather not, because it feels better to do it by hand?
It’s not just about speed today. It’s about the speed to make changes, to understand the minutia of the code to more quickly troubleshoot when something goes wrong, to better understand the implication of future changes…
Just yesterday I was on a call where someone was trying to point to my code as a problem when we suspected a DNS issue. If I didn’t know the code inside and out, I could have easily been steam rolled, because as we know, “it’s never the network”. We found out today it was in fact DNS.
If someone only ever worries about is speed, they’ll likely get tripped up and fall. One guy on my team is all about delivering quickly. He gives very optimistic timelines and gets things out the door as fast as possible. Guess what, the code breaks. He is constantly getting bug reports from everyone and having to fix stuff. As he continues to run into this, he is starting to become a bit more mature and tactical, but that is taking time.
I think the CEO would much rather see the production code be fully tested and stable. I write the frameworks everyone else on the team uses. If my code breaks, everyone’s code is broken. How much will that cost?
Why would I give a rat’s ass what my CEO thinks. I do my job the way I want to in a way that allows me to keep going. If the CEO wants it a different way he can fire me, and pay me 10 months worth of wages while I look for a different job.
I know the code I produce is damn good, and I take pride in my extremely low defect rate. I will not be rushed. I will not be pushed. And I will do so until the day I retire.
My CEO is fine as long as the project is profitable, which is part of my responsibility, and they are actually on board with us delivering the best quality we can under that constraint, not only because our clients do notice quality, but also as a matter of principle.
Most people pushing back against data centers simply don't want invite something into their city that will use up resources (likely raising prices), while the big selling point is that it will put them out of work. You can say that won't actually happen and everyone will keep their jobs, but that has not been the messaging. CEOs want to know how many people they can get rid of once they start using AI. Why would anyone sign up to have that in their backyard?
> Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late.
I saw this a lot in college. Kids that didn’t have any freedom or autonomy while living at home went wild in college. They had no idea how to self-regulate. A lot of them failed out. Those who didn’t had some rough years. Sheltering kids for too long seems to do more harm than good. At least if they run into issues while still children, their parents can be there to help them through it so they can better navigate on their own once they move out.
It is a common tactic among abusive parents to convince their child without them, they'd be unable to survive in the wider world. Any mistakes will become irrefutable proof thereof, and any attempts to break this control and do things on their own will be treated as ingratitude, often prompting the abuser to instantly abandon all parental duties to "teach a lesson".
I don't disagree, but in this context I don't think those are the same parents that are yeeting their kids off to board at university as soon as they are of age.
As one of those kids, you could’ve just stopped at “I don’t think”, because you’re not thinking critically if you think we don’t exist.
I wasn’t allowed to have a personal device or unsupervised internet access until I graduated.
My parents forced me to go to a school with a summer work program. I was yeeted to university by my wing clipping abusers THREE DAYS AFTER GRADUATION.
Rural, miles from the nearest town of 1200 so I didn’t have access to the resources needed to change any aspect of this.
I was deeply hampered by this, and despite being one of the salutatorians of my graduating class (we had ties due to AP), I crashed out of that university after a semester.
Uh huh. And some kids haven't got their head straight after puberty at 16, and still need (or would have needed) the training wheels. Blaming it on their parents would seem unfair.
Society works on averages. Most people being ready little adults at 16 doesn't mean everyone is.
Edit: yeah, look at the downvotes. How are you all doing with that self-regulation?
I think you're responding to an argument I didn't make. And I feel necessary to point it out because it looks like other people may be reading it like that, too.
(a) Quote from TFA is about using internet. GP talks about "didn’t have any freedom or autonomy" which I don't take quite as literally as you do, because they also mention "I saw this a lot in college". So it would have been quite regular level of (over)controlling, instead of locking them in and not letting them leave the house except for school.
(b) I am not advocating anything as a solution. I am pointing out that the simple cause and effect presented by GP might be more complicated.
I think the point I’m trying to make, albeit very bluntly is people often make the banal point that kids these days are too sheltered because they turned out fine. But they’re actually just observing survivorship bias.
I'm sure a study can follow kids or look in records, but that takes serious time, so I can understand looking at oneself and everyone you know and coming to a conclusion that way. Do you know if such a study had been done and the results or conclusions are publicly available somewhere?
The person you replied to didn't mention their own life at all, and they were talking about a good number of data points. That's not "just survivorship bias". The data of college kids is biased in some ways but it's not useless.
12 is the magic number when things start going to shit. I'm sorry for what happened to you but maybe you should start a counselling service for clueless parents and tell them what should they do and what they shouldn't to correctly shelter the children. Because sheltering is an art. I think about it all the time. I always wish some one would take a bit of money but tell me how to guide or not guide my child to be independent in the rough world and to take decisions independently
This is a comforting fiction. I've seen it go both ways where children with freedom develop pornography or drug habits and sheltered kids turn out well-adjusted and regulated.
I thought it was a typo but I see you've replied elsewhere that these really are the two options
> I've seen it go both ways where children with freedom [turn bad] and sheltered kids turn [good]
So you've seen it one way, as in, each approach leading to one specific outcome? "Both ways" would be sheltered leading to different outcomes in different cases, or unsheltered leading to different outcomes in different cases
I don't feel like I've been sheltered. My parents literally proposed that I drink some alcohol and encouraged that I go out partying at some point. Both things still don't interest me. (At least they didn't tell me to smoke, lol. But alcohol seems to be considered normal and potentially even healthy in small doses so they thought I should try it.) Online, I later learned that their opinion was that I'll just not look up things which I don't want to see, and in my case that has been true. I'm sorry to tell you I never had a porn addiction
Someone else pointed out that such anecdotes are survivorship bias: you might not see the people that didn't turn out alright. In my case that's certainly true, I'm not sure that I know anyone who didn't turn out okay. We take different paths through life but if you can provide for yourself and dependents, and are happy most of the time, I'd count that as success (also dependent on age: I'm not counting that my 90yo grandpa is currently often unhappy due to bad health)
A failure of management can still lead to a successful business for a variety of reasons, ranging from an in-demand product and lucky timing to great employees. Bad parenting with a great child or a great school might, too, lead to positive outcomes
I'd call an approach suboptimal or bad depending on how likely it is to lead to bad outcomes, given what the parents know about the child at the time of course (sheltering or other special approaches may be needed in some cases, depending on behavior or health circumstances). It doesn't have to turn out bad in every single case, or even a majority, there just has to be consensus about the evidence and the parents must have been able to know of it. It would have to be really bad (like complete neglect) before I'd call it a failure though
That’s usually coupled with a lot of anxiety. Some level anxiety could be useful, as it can make a person look responsible. This can come at a heavy cost though, which they may not let others see, and might not even realize themselves until later in life.
Because they don't. In order to do anything successfully you need practice. You're just depriving the kid of practicing the single most important skill - autonomy.
reply