That feeling - that it's almost there - is one of the most frustrating and intoxicating feelings we experience in the age of artificial intelligence.
Machine translation from the original post. Not reviewed by a human translator. Historical claims may no longer be current.
That feeling - that it's almost there - is one of the most frustrating and intoxicating feelings we experience in the age of artificial intelligence.
The illusion of almost - The AI Mirage
It's a feeling that combines hope and despair at the same time.
At first, you're flying high on the progress. A tool like Cursor or ChatGPT writes code for you, suggests solutions, and you tell yourself: how crazy is this! Within an hour I'm closing this!
But then - half a detail doesn't work.
A line of code that doesn't compile.
An API that doesn't connect.
A solution that feels "90% right", but somehow still doesn't run.
Instead of admitting that we've reached a point where the AI can no longer hold up on its own, we convince ourselves that in a moment it'll sort itself out.
And that's the thing - it really does look like it's there.
Like a thread slipping from the hand, like a flickering lamp that only needs one more twist to stabilize.
And then the "loop" begins:
• One more question to the AI.
• One more, more precise phrasing.
• One more small attempt to fix manually and then check again.
• One more line of code to add or delete.
And time passes.
And then, instead of working on the problem itself, we work on trying to get the AI to understand us better.
And that's the breaking point: instead of the AI working for us, we become intermediaries between ourselves and it, sucked into a game of wording and interpretation, until we barely remember what the solution we wanted in the first place looked like.
And the most frustrating part?
When we almost succeed, it's much harder to stop.
Because if I were far from the solution, I would have left long ago.
But I'm so close!
So how can I give up now?
But sometimes, the wisdom is not in pushing one more step - but in asking why am I even stuck here?