I felt lost immediately. All the creativity, the humanity, the endless hours of putting soul into something. Gone

For one hour or so I had some kind of existential crisis. Just because of a funny slogan on a shirt. And sometimes I still feel empty on new projects. You can produce so much things so fast, but if it should be something original - it is hard to get it generated by AI while still feeling that it is something that you came up with

"The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped."

AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise.

Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix.

So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.

Like, apparently Mr. Smucker has a friend who's into fly fishing, and the time to talk to that person. Great! Good for him! If I do not have a friend who's into fly fishing, or if I need an answer quickly, am I...just out of luck?

I understand the impulse behind posts like this, and it's important to remember to maintain human connections. (Arguably, once we learn how to do this because we think it's a good in its own right and not because we have to, we'll be better off.) But I just don't like being emotionally browbeaten like this because I have a question that I need an answer for that I don't have the time, money, or access to go get in a different way.

I sometimes feel like technologists actually desire to remove the humanity from the world because it's messy and they don't understand it and therefore they fear it.

When LLMs first showed up I thought “but doesn’t this take away a little bit of what my life is? Don’t I like programming and solving the problems and learning the unexpected things and so on?”

Now I use them extensively, daily, millions of tokens per day, and I still ask that question.

I don’t use them for recipes or toasts or camping trips. I use them for brute-forcing boring stuff. Like, hey we’re making this thing faster. Let’s measure all this stuff, and you come up with whatever I’ve missed to include in benchmarks. Make a benchmark harness for each approach we’ll try. Create tests to ensure none of the changes alter behaviour or outputs of the system. Make it pipe results into this database with this schema. Let’s try these approaches. Which other approaches could work? Keep slamming these benchmarks until statistically significant results appear.

The thing we’re speeding up is usually a single query in the armpit of an application that in prior years I never would have been able to address. But now I can. By doing this I can improve the user experience and scale back our resources and other stuff we like.

Am I missing out? I don’t know. I program less. I get a lot more done. My employer is very happy. My team expresses appreciating my work more than ever. It’s a stark contrast, actually. It feels weird.

I’m still not sure what the answer is. I do miss tinkering. Yet I suppose the point was never me tinkering. It was me having a job to perform for a specific purpose for my employers.

Did it take away a bit of what my life is, or did it change it? I’m still using my brain. I’m still thinking through problems. I’m still finding bugs and mentally tracing them to understand how to work through it with Claude. But the actual moving of bits? I don’t do it anywhere near as much as I used to.

I’m still very conflicted about it.

I’m so disturbed when I see friends and family using AI for ‘real’ stuff. Recipes, images, writing, etc.

Is programming ‘real stuff’ too, though?

At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.

There are 1) the tools that let us surface the human, then there is 2) the human, and then there comes 3) the factory generated business (someone doesn’t care but has to do it) content pretending to be human to sell stuff to humans. The human 2) is drowned out by the “had to do it” 3) while there is a small corner of some of us who are making 1) tools to surface and reward more 2).

- My doctor friend does not wanting me pinging them asking for free medical advice every time I get health anxiety

- My chef friend does not want me calling them every time I'm struggling with a recipe

- My author friend does not want to read the 20th draft of my book, in which I've changed perhaps 10% of the content from the last draft

In these, the cost is a tax on the relationship -- relying on someone else too much to the point where it could potentially be impacting _their_ life.

Similarly, there are enough communities out there that are not accommodating -- even if I wanted to get a human answer and/or connect with someone, the interactions themselves can be painful. Do we remember what it was like posting on Stack Overflow? Do we believe Stack Overflow was a one-off outlier?

I also believe human imagination and knowledge shouldn't be bound to the relationships you have around you. What if my social group is small, or diversity of knowledge that my social group has is small? Should I not be able to think and explore an idea because my best alternative would be to contact a professor at a university that 99% of the time will not answer me?

I do believe that many people use AI now instead of learning and connecting -- I know my own programmatic knowledge has weakened now that AI has acted as a superhuman autocorrect. But on the other hand, with the help of AI I've also learned about a ton of things that would have otherwise been unavailable to me -- and I believe has improved me on the whole.

Sometimes it feels like all digital technology is simply an enterprise to replace human to human contact.

I saw a video a while back on one social media site or another where someone sitting in a car recorded three young men shotgunning some beers on an apartment balcony. The insinuation being that hanging out was cringe, and that the poster had caught some losers in the act.

It's hard to gauge "real" general sentiment from social media, but if having a beer in a slightly silly way is the level of vulnerability at which you can be recorded for public ridicule, it's not hard to empathize with a generation reluctant to reach out for connection.

In that movie only the protagonist had the magic remote to fast-forward through existence. It was a tragedy of self-destruction.

But what if everyone gets the remote at roughly the same time?

I don't think it began with AI. We repeatedly catch the car we're very deeply programmed to chase. We want to minimize discomfort, risk, suffering, adversity. We want to maximize safety and comfort. We want all of our kids to make it to adulthood. We want to disinfect the planet of all diseases. We want our bodies to survive a career. We want our families to survive every winter. Those goals are all completely sensible.

But parents, for example, have been here before and recognize that optimizing these sensible goals have a consequence of missing the richness in the journies we no-longer need to take. So have those who have grappled with social media addiction or the withering effect of sedentary careers, or even the little things like waiting at the radio for your favourite song, your finger hovering eagerly over the record button of your cassette player.

I think this is going to be the supreme challenge. We're wired to seek the destination of comfort, but we lose the journey to reach it. It was easier when we had no choice. But we're doing a great job optimizing the soul out of being human.

On the other hand, if I live in 150 years ago where telephone had not been invented, I may never make such decision to live so far away from my parents at all.

"Technology giveth and technology taketh away"

If AI is special, unlike any other tool, why aren't you using it that much?

I personally don't think it's anything special, and if I knew I'll die soon and were planning my last trip with my child, I'd use AI, just like I'd use a credit card, or my phone.

It allows me to spend more time with other people, getting boring tasks done much quicker.

AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.

As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses.

We are certainly scrambling for productivity with "token maxxing" and scrambling for entertainment with AI companions, but I haven't seen many thoughtful takes on how AI might look in a life well-lived.

I've seen other parents create AI videos of their toddlers being visited at night by Santa. I've seen parents happily throw their children into AI video generators to entertain them.

People are using AI recklessly. I can't imagine stealing the gift of a child's imagination away from them and instead, replacing it with these hollow representations of reality. It disgusts me.

I use AI all the time for coding, but I've drawn a hard line at the point of intermediation with others.

Then there's this business about "AI removing connections to people". My wife's an artist (and now a Creative Director in a corp) and she used an early image model years ago to iterate on the design that we then had embroidered onto my sherwani[1] in India through a close friend's connection and I made a suno.ai tune to walk out for my wedding to. My wife and I use this new tech to model things and print it out on our 3D printer[2] so we can reuse my daughter's infant-stage play pen as gates now that she's older. My wife once tried to make us persimmon bread from a recipe that 3.5 gave us. We have a claw-like bot that is hooked up to our calendar, contacts, history, planes, airbnbs, hotels and so on and helps us with stuff.

By any measure, we are pretty social people and we are quite happy. And the thing to note is that, as far as I can see, we are not particularly remarkable. This seems to be the standard way most people I know use LLMs: to do things that they wouldn't cross the effort/reward threshold otherwise. And there's no grand disaster happening.

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community

1: https://x.com/arjie/status/1855328068883353665?s=20

2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_Wit...

If someone hasn't gotten the memo yet, writing code got that serious at least a decade ago when web ate the world and chrome had won the web. Probably even earlier for certain industries like financial institutions.

This isn't just about "human imperfections" or something else sentimental. It's the fact that quality really does matter in a huge number of situations and the consequences are not forgiving in the slightest.

The second part assumes AI writing can substitute mastery of writing, and simultaneously, not be good enough.

We have, for a several thousand years, continued to develop labor and cost saving technology. We have been OK thus far.

On the other hand, tech in general (not just AI) does make an easier and easier path for people to go inward and neglect their community/family/friends. This does suck.

No one is forcing you or pressuring you to not call friend to ask for recipe. Even AI would say that you should talk to friends.

OP should consider a side career in poetry.

Stop using the computer to talk to strangers, take your feed and go to your neighbour and talk to them.

Stop buying online. Spend your free time in the crowded city and ask someone in the electronic store who doesn't know shit.

Just go to the place everyone else is going at the same time because its a lot more fun than trying to pre analyse it upfront.

How about stop buying pasta for once? Do you know how easy it is to make pasta at home? You only need to grow your wheat, store it, mill it, ...

Its a tool, its an interesting tool. Keep your brain engaged and keep an eye on it were it leads. Stop having knee jerk reactions like the old people...

And yes not everyone can take a sabatical to write their dream book. Surprise \o/ but perhaps i can get it out of my system and i might enjoy seeing a good enough version.

For my first dev job, I was made to set up a sole proprietorship just so the company could illegally dodge minimum wage and severance. I didn't get mentored; I learned through constant abuse. It was only when I first used AI that I realized the people around me were teaching me garbage and my books were completely obsolete.

I envy that this person was surrounded by people who cared. Before AI, trying to learn programming just meant dealing with insults. They can stay in touch with their network because they were respected. I had zero people in my environment for intellectual discussions or programming.

It really shows how your environment shapes your relationship with tools. I have a love-hate dynamic with AI. It frustrates me that my manual coding skills are degrading, but I'm incredibly thankful for the easy access to knowledge I never had. At the end of the day, reading this just makes me envy those who get to live and work in a warm, respectful setting.

as if you're choosing between "Claude, tell me how to make an omelette" and walking across the forest path to your sylvan neighbor, the former Michelin-star chef who set up an artisanal microgastropub by the pond

as opposed to googling "omelet recipe"

The only thing that makes sense is that it’s being flagged, I guess.

This is easiest to see in games, when people complain about the balance of a game, they often want some "problems" to be solved. "This map is massive, can't we just create teleportation nodes everywhere? Can't we just have a very fast flying mount?". To me this is missing the point, is battle mechanic an obstacle over the story? Maybe it is, but have you considered that they expected to experience the story with the combat?

In real life, it is not so easy to say "This problem is necessary for human life". If an LLM can infer what I want to say to someone in a much clearer form, should we do that? Should we use LLM to fix all of our grammars? Should making accounts be really cheap? Is market making a problem that we should solve? Should we really make it easier for people to invest i.e. democratizing finance? Should we really give everyone access to 1GBps bandwidth internet? Should we really want full internet access everywhere even in the middle of Amazon forest?

Personally, I don't know if the answer is that straightforward. For each of the items I listed, I can see things that we lose. A lot of humanity is problem solving, and we have solve a lot of problems that have kept humanity busy for most of their lives. We are not living in an era where problems that we face are unique and we are simply not designed for.

When I start thinking we programmers are the most pedantic people around, I just look at some writers and feel a little better.

The shit all looks the same. Every taco truck in town uses the same crappy style advertisements, all the food looks the same (AI tacos, not pictures of actual food...)

I liked small business advertisements better when it was full of crappy fonts, clashing color choices, horrifying JPEG artifacts and all.

Software, and knowledge work in general, is facing an even deeper form of alienation from AI. I don't see how I (just past 30) or future generations will be able to find deep satisfaction from "knowledge work" if this current trajectory holds. I don't think our brains are wired for a life of this without tremendous mental anguish.

Please use the internet.

Please use search engines.

Please use AI.

Everything old is good and everything new is evil. The irony of this being posted online in written form is lost on the author. Socrates would probably have an aneurysm.

AI is really cool technology, but the cost is tremendous.

Like I don't want to say it's a strawman exactly, because some people probably do use AI too much. But it's a really emotional (and not exactly logical) play to emotions that sort of implies don't use AI at all, which I don't agree with.

Like if you're writing a speech for my wedding, please do a sanity check against AI before saying a really crass or risky joke. Because some of us have those maybe-on-the-spectrum acquaintances and AI actually can be a great sanity check for those people.

- Dr. Snaut, Solaris (1972)

the weird line breaks

extremely jarring.

But it was an interesting

article nevertheless.

..which is only going to get worse the more you rely on a statisical model for things instead of talking to people.

Thank you!

I'm so sick and tired of the endless slaps on the wrist because I choose to live my life in a way that the author would not prefer.

Sure, buddy, you know how to live a meaningful life, then why are you trolling the internet?

> write a haiku for stop using AI for human things and use it for automating the boring stuff

    Let humans create,
    Leave the soul to living minds,
    Let code do the chores.

This is just obnoxious. People still bond, have discussions and arguments without pulling out their phones every few minutes. Relationships are still a thing. But for 99% of questions or tasks, I just want to get it done and not drag in friends and family.

I wouldn't have called a friend for a meal plan or to figure out a hiking path 10 years ago, I would have used a search engine.

If I want to talk to a friend, I don't need an excuse to do so. And I'm not going to waste their time by asking something I can easily figure out on my own, today with AI, years ago with Google, and prior to that with printed material.

The anti-AI craze is just as bad as the "AI will solve everything" crowd.

I am pleased that I can share musical discoveries with friends that were recommended by an AI, or make them laugh with some absurd image that fell out of Dall-E.

I am happy that, with the help of an AI, i can make a news reader that is full of bright patterns, instead of dark ones, that i can share with my friends so that their standard of life is ever-so-slightly better.

Reducing the commentary to "tool bad" is lazy, even when beautifully phrased