I’m tired of being a ping-pong ball bashed between the paddles of market forces I’m not influential enough to affect. It’s exhausting to live through history. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I would have enjoyed not living through the AI paradigm transition. It is a tool that—though incredible at deriving efficiency, saving me from boring bullshit work, and tolerating my stupid questions—has stolen something from me: the future.

“He’s being melodramatic,” you say, smugly switching apps to Instagram to congratulate yourself on an astute observation by nuking your prefrontal cortex with a firehose of derivative slop. 👏👏👏

No shit.

I enjoy writing software by hand. I enjoy all of the little problems I get to solve, and all of the creative choices I get to make. I like seeing something I made, that a community made, making people’s lives easier. I like caring what real people do with my tool, and making it better for them. All successful FOSS software projects start from the kernel of solving a problem for their creator. It is the fire that cooks the cow, and makes one damn good steak. Look at Bun. The preeminent modern JavaScript/TypeScript runtime and—for lack of a better phrase—developer kit was created because Jarred Sumner was working on a Mincreaft-y voxel game in his browser and it took too long to iterate changes. I made ZVM because Zig and ZLS were—and still are—a pain to install and keep up to date. Git was created to solve the problems of the Linux kernal maintainers. I could go on, but the horse is already glue. What have we lost already because AI removes the human element from solving these problems. Is this the inflection point where “good enough” is actually good enough when there’s no cost to re-abstract a codebase or craft a command line tool?

Work created by AI has no soul, and the work it does has no story. It is slop—no matter how excellently crafted. With it there is something lost. You cannot be proud of code an AI wrote, no matter how excellent your idea and your prompt because you did not write it. You did not make the tough decisions and weight the options required to make something with craft. It could function perfectly, better than the best code written by man, and it would still be slop.

Not everything in life is about efficiency. I don’t watch a movie at 2x speed despite being able to get through it faster. Unfortunately, I don’t really have the choice with AI. It’s incredible at writing code. As long as I communicate well, it generally does exactly what I want 100x faster than I could do it. I know how to do it, but why would I when I could do 20x more work at a comparable skill level 100x faster? That makes no sense as a worker. I need to stay competitive. I need to matter, so I’ve found myself becoming a manager. I write the outline, I write the examples, I write the important code, and the rest is filled out. It’s dampened my love of the game.

Luckily, I’m not a one trick pony. I can write! How well is up to you, but I went to school for journalism. Even if AI takes over all of my coding work, I have real skills working with humans. I don’t see a world in which that goes away, at least in my lifetime. It just sucks having my passions and career threatened by a machine that was trained off the back of my labor, and I’m still paying $20 for a bag of frozen shrimp while these 7 companies slurp dollars out of each others bellybuttons like a college house party.

Where are the laws? Where are the regulations? Where is the competency to save the global economy from a surefire crash? Why are models closed-source? I know they’ve trained off AGPL licensed software. Was it all just a feel good story until somebody made too much money to hinder? Is that the only thing that matters?

I refuse to buy that. I will continue to write here on this blog my thoughts and feelings and frustrations.

I should say that if you are okay with pushing slop to production, I don’t mean to yuck your yum. This post isn’t intended to bash regular people that use AI, or even vibe coders. I’m not an old man yelling at the clouds. Simply a young man bemoaning the loss of beauty that will now never exist.