Revenge of the Dilettantes

While writing about Miller’s essay, I wanted to add a note on what AI means for a dilettante life. I’d saved a few highlights to Readwise that I wanted to quote, and while searching for them, I stumbled on this brilliant post by Venkatesh Rao, whom I’ve been a fan of for a very long time. It pretty much sums up what I’m about to say. But let me say it anyway.

I’ve always wanted to do a whole variety of things, but my imagination kept straining against the limits of what I could actually do. A lot of my ideas had code-shaped expressions, and I never learned to code, apart from a few brief bursts of commitment that lasted a day or two. So those ideas remained just that: ideas in my head. Much like Rao says, writing became the only accessible way to express what I wanted to, which is why I started so many writing projects, including this one.

Now those limitations are no longer limitations. If anything, they’ve become expressive, generative freedoms, because you have a magical genie. Rao calls it a jinn. A magic lamp you rub, or a wand you wave, and the thing you want comes to life. At no point in human history was this ever true. As long as your idea has a software-shaped expression (and increasingly, even that isn’t required), you can tell the genie, and it will deliver. The binding constraint is no longer how good the tools are. It’s your imagination. For the most part, if you can imagine it, it can be done.

These things have gotten so good it’s ridiculous. I used to add a caveat whenever I talked about AI coding tools: that I was measuring their awesomeness against my normie baseline. I don’t think that qualifier is needed anymore. They’re awesome whether you’re an expert, a normie or a dilettante, and especially if you’re a dilettante. What once felt magical has quickly become commonplace, because that’s who we are; we get used to things. But the ambitious, complex, nightmarishly hard things you can now accomplish are nuts.

I’ve fully embraced my dilettante worldview, to the point where I think I have a full-blown case of AI delirium. There are simple projects like thisindianlife.today (opens in a new tab), measure.thisindianlife.today (opens in a new tab), tipsheet.market (opens in a new tab) and this very site, all vibe coded. And then there are akshara.ink (opens in a new tab) and paperlanterns.ink (opens in a new tab), where I’m digitizing books and historical letter collections, the kind of reasonably complex work that was out of reach for dilettantes for a very long time. I’m cranking out everything I ever wanted to make, and I’m having more fun than ever.

AI is an unlock for dilettantes. In fact, it’s speed and ecstasy for dilettantes. It amplifies their instincts and lets them express those instincts more creatively. It gives them more degrees of freedom. And it shrinks the time it takes to dive into a new field, because so much of the grunt work and manual effort is gone. Now you just summon your genie to commit acts of sorcery and witchcraft on your behalf. Or, as Rao puts it:

a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s vibecoding for?

B.