April 23, 2025
Maybe you'll think this sounds ridiculous, but I don't give a fuck. I'm going to say my piece.
"My hands are freaks. [...] There is a power in them out of proportion with the rest of me. If I am a blade, they are my edge."
- Darrow, Red Rising
I write software, and I fucking hate AI.
My "edge" - the thing that made me stand out - was being detailed and precise. Writing neat, visually appealing code. Clear comments made with purpose that sometimes exceeded the length of the function that followed. Git commits that sat below the 50 character limit, so they appeared nicely when viewed on the web. Inordinate amounts of time spent doubling back over an implementation to cut out the cruft.
I would write it the first time to fully understand it - and again to write it correctly. I'd pay attention to the details.
The code was my art form. The way it looked visually - both when you scrolled past it at a glance, and when you stopped to read each line. The software produced at the end of it was a beautiful artifact of my painstaking toil. The aesthetics mattered. Getting to the outcome without doing it right was unacceptable to me, and I was frustratingly anal about this to an almost harmful degree.
And yet, that attitude made the end result so much sweeter.
I honed my craft. My free time was spent continuously improving with vim motions. It was spent listening to discussions by well known industry professionals and the sharp minds of budding enthusiasts. It was spent customizing my window manager so I was able to efficiently navigate my system and reduce the time it takes from not knowing something, to having the docs open in front of me, to getting back into my code, and finally looking over the result.
I read about type system theory, security, algorithms, I listened to dogmatic developers full of heart putting forward their novel ideas. I relished it.
I fully understand the pretentiousness of describing something as seemingly "mundane" as coding like it's art. Guess what? To me it was. Art is a form of self expression.
Each project was a brilliant fractal of problems spiralling out from my will to create. Each substructure another opportunity to express myself through code. The way I chose to split an idea into pieces and build those pieces up to produce the whole - was me.
The minutia of it is fundamental to it being my own. I genuinely enjoy looking back over code I've written and appreciating the time that went into its elegance and form.
Don't get me wrong, of course I've spent time building my foundation on the fundamentals: designing systems, problem solving, prioritization, abstraction, debugging. The thing is: my joy was derived from applying those skills with precision and excellence.
Writing this is screaming out into the void because it doesn't fucking matter anymore. AI has cheapened the things that I put time into. They are either irrelevant, or they're available to the masses at the click of a button. What was once an indicator of someone who cared deeply, is now a telltale sign of someone who does not.
I fundamentally understand that democratizing the ability to produce software, both small and large, is a net benefit to society. And yet, I can't help but feel cheated. I feel so unbelievably alone in this. The people whose views are closest to mine still advocate for using AI under specific circumstances.
Too many see "code" as means to an end. An intrusion that sits between an idea and a product. Does a painter find the act of painting to be an obstacle that they'd rather skip so they can marvel upon a completed canvas? Does a musician detest ideating about a chorus, refining it, and experimenting with new styles and techniques? Do they see that process as an obstacle between an idea and a song playing through their headphones?
I'd argue that those who see things that way are not the painters and the musicians. They're the consumers.
Things only seem that way if one hasn't ever bothered to spend time suffering through something to come out the other end loving and having grown from it. For me, writing code is no different. It's the creative process.
The software at the end is not the only showpiece.
To the vibe coders and their proponents: Fuck you. Thank you for irrevocably taking my favourite hobby and turning it into something indistinguishable from apathy. Your future is bright and you have a long career ahead of you.
To the others who are in my shoes (and for the love of God I hope there's still at least one), I hope you feel seen. I hope this resonates with you.
For those of us who have put in our 10,000 hours to sharpen these skills, to become the best we can be, only to have the utility of our craft abruptly ripped out from under us - to have that "edge" dulled by swiftly advancing technology,
Pour one out.