For as long as I can recall, there's been a 'thing' in parts of the UK – honesty boxes. As part of our (once) high trust society, people put their 'wares' – whether that be cakes, jams, vegetables etc – at the end of their driveway, with an 'honesty box' for you to deposit the relevant financial amount for whatever you take. Presumably other coutries have the same, I hope so.

There is a feeling I can't quite describe when I use an honesty box. It's a wholesome feeling. The fact that some other person I have never met, has toiled away on something to offer to the world, and not only that, they are trusting another human to do the right thing in return. I trust they have made something good, and they trust I will give them the required value for it.

The Internet equivalent

I think of the countless personal blogs that have been started, then populated and maintained over the last 20+ years as the Internet equivalent of honesty boxes. Often, they provide some means of giving away, or sharing, hard won techniques, experience and solutions. And generally, they are done with little forethought or desire to extracting any kind of monetary gain from them.

From my own perspective, the trickle of money generated by an advert on my site, or by some kind soul buying me a coffee (which as a blog owner makes you feel like you have won the lottery), was purely a means of putting some money towards the hosting costs. Certainly never something that generated profit. I don't imagine there are many blog owners where that is any different.

But it has always felt worthwhile because it felt good to know some person out there might benefit, in the same way I had, from other peoples writing and hard won successes over the years. Reciprocation is a fundamenatally human thing.

But now – because of AI – well, what is the point?

AI stole all the Jam

The thing is, no-one really goes to blogs like mine, or even problem solving behemoths like the Stack Overflows of the world anymore. Why would they? AI has hovered up everyones content to spoon feed back to them. At their cost.

AI has performed the equivalent act of pulling up outside an honesty box, and not just taking all the content from inside, but tearing the entire box off the wall. It's like Tesco (or whatever large retail chain is suitable in your area), organising a mass raid of the entire World's honesty box contents, and then sticking it all on their shelves to sell to the general public.

Where does this lead?

I'm seldom writing anything technical these days. It feels pointless. After all, fewer and fewer people are writing code anyway. So at this point, aren't I just feeding the AI beast?

Even occasional reviews of products I do get hovered up, and distilled into some other form, whether I'm happy about that form or not.

So now what? What does it mean for us all in the blogosphere?

I don't have original thoughts here. I know many people have been over the same ground. And no one knows for sure. But this is what I see around me.

New devs understand very little of the code that AI is producing for them. Alarmingly little. And day to day, currently, they likely don't need to, and so the previous fervour to learn and understand a language has given way to a fervour for the latest model, and how much more it is capable of doing for us.

Large codebases written in something industry standard like React are easy to iterate on with AI. Due the abundance of (human) writing on that platform in the last decade plus there is a corpus of information waiting to be fed back to the user.

But maybe at some point in the not too distant future, is AI is going to fall behind? If people aren't documenting the problems, and their solutions, do we put our trust in AI to hold all our experience? Will it ever be shared human to human? Can AI innovate in future?

Will it?

I can't help feeling before long, certainly within a generation of developers, we will have a knowledge drop-off of alarming proportions, where the field becomes so bereft of new minds and ideas it stagnates as a field into mediocrity and the problem solvers and innovators of the next generation will go to some different industry.

A sadness

So the Internet honesty boxes are going. And I think the World is worse for it. In the future, people will never know how great it was, if only for a brief few years, to stumble across some persons blog, read about their approach to something, how they solved a problem, a technique they developed that you could adopt to your own needs and if lucky even exchange a few comments with the author. d

It was digital, but it felt human in some way. Personal.

And it feels like we need those kind of connections now more than ever.