Technically I did way back at the beginning of my career, but only due to interdepartmental budgetary shenanigans going on under the table. The company needed a programmer but the programming department's headcount was full. They had room for a technical writer in that department's headcount but didn't need one. So I got hired as a technical writer, started coding, and then about six months later got "promoted" to the correct department the moment there was an opportunity to do so. It was all planned ahead of time, though. I was never really a technical writer.

Ah, dumb business tricks.

"AI isn't capable of taking any jobs away."

And surely when the AI bubble pops everything will go back to the way it was in 2022 before ChatGPT.

(I have no subscriptions to any cloud-based coding AI currently because I can run Qwen3.8-27B locally on my desktop and it's perfectly fine for everything I've thrown at it so far, it's just a little slow. If I was a business it wouldn't cost much to have a server rack that could run the latest big DeepSeek models at a speedy clip. AI is simply not going away at this point even if OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, etc. evaporated tomorrow in a puff of stock fraud.)

I think your view of what a "hobby" is might be a bit too high-level or generic.

For example, I play tabletop RPGs with my friends, it's my hobby. I use AI extensively in the course of that, either as GM or as player, but it isn't doing the hobby for me. It's automating the stuff that would be drudgery or overly expensive. Previously if I wanted a customized image that illustrated a particular scenario or monster I would laboriously piece it together with the Gimp and get a mediocre result. I enjoyed having the end result to show to players, but I didn't enjoy the process. AI now automates that process so I get the good without the bad.

If I was an artist who enjoyed the process of making art, then obviously I wouldn't be using AI for that. But I might use AI to discuss ideas or layout or generate a bunch of mockups, if that was a part of the process that I found tedious. Every hobby has some labor-saving steps that people like to use to skip over the parts they don't like doing. Few artsts mix their own pigments or stretch their own canvases, they go to a hobby store and buy machine-made materials instead.

So, too, in the case of vibe coding. I'm a professional programmer, I'm good at programming, but that doesn't mean I like every aspect of it. Or even most aspects of it! There's a ton of tedium. Why not automate the parts I don't like?

People twist and turn to vilify the things they want to vilify and excuse the things they want to excuse. I've been seeing it increasingly in the context of AI where people draw distinctions between "generative AI" and "machine learning" based on whether they like the individual application or not. It might be fine to use LLMs for assistance with programming, but the same LLM becomes Satan incarnate if it's helping write a fanfic. Photoshop can use AI to do image segmentation for "smart select" but the same AI is taking jobs from artists if it touches one pixel's colour values.

We're a little way off from optical implants becoming good and popular yet, so I guess we'll just have to see which way the winds are blowing when we get there. Probably it'll be fine, I expect most people will find ways to excuse them.

People join the Russian military for the same reasons. I see plenty of celebration of them getting killed.

Small studios will also leap on the opportunity to get more done with less money. I'd expect them to be more eager than the big studios since they have less resources to start with.

We're working on automating the labor too. Turns out art was just easier.

Yeah, it does seem inconsistent with the view that anything AI touches must obviously look awful.

The King of Canada is the King of Canada.

He also happens to be the King of some other minor countries here and there, but those are separate titles.

Sheesh, I hate that we're at the point where I feel bad for Mitch McConnell. This is elder abuse.

Thanks, but I can't claim credit - it's a Simpsons quote (Sideshow Bob complaining about being charged with attempted murder for trying to kill Bart).

Why would there be? There isn't a Nobel Prize for Attempted Chemistry.