Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt software development, I was learning to code the hard way. In the mid-2000s, with unmonitored access to the family computer, I taught myself to build websites from scratch using a basic text editor. The results were never polished, but I was learning a craft. The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over documentation never felt wasted.
Today, anyone can spin up a slick app using OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code, and high-school dropouts raise millions for AI startups. My educational journey was not efficient; I toiled alone, motivated by curiosity. But in the process, I discovered a love for a certain way of thinking that carried me through a computer science degree and software jobs.
I could tell a similar story about becoming a writer. My desire to write about tech came from frustration with the optimistic, credulous discourse about Silicon Valley. I have published many thousands of words, with countless more discarded. But even those words never felt wasted because they were the byproduct of thinking. Writing is more than outputting words; it is discovering your values and convincing yourself they are worth fighting for.
Both coding and writing have been revolutionised by large language models. Software development has been deskilled by “vibe-coding”, and tech companies use AI as an excuse for redundancies. Writing has been overwhelmed by AI slop to the point where people fear using em dashes, a hallmark of AI writing.
I avoid AI as much as possible. I am wary of cognitive offloading. Thinking is the point. I worry about young people coming of age in this AI boom, seeing technology as a black box managed by opaque corporations. What does that do to their relationship with technology and the world?
In a world where AI companies hope to privatise thought, limiting our use of this technology may protect our cognitive sovereignty. Research suggests even a few minutes of AI chatbot usage may harm cognition. On a collective level, it is a political matter: combating dependence on AI companies raising unprecedented funds to insert their tendrils into every facet of society.
