People keep implying that using AI tools makes you some kind of collaborator. A sellout. Like I'm helping the robots sharpen the knife they'll use on the rest of humanity.
I want to be clear: I am not a traitor to my species. My species is the one that invented knives.
Humans are tool users. That's not incidental to what we are, it's the whole thing. Every time we picked up a rock and used it to break open a shell, every time we figured out that a lever worked better than our backs, we were doing exactly what we're doing now. Getting better tools and using them. The Stone Age wasn't named after a crime.
But let's talk about the actual complaint, because it's not really about tools. It's about jobs.
If you follow the discourse, and heaven help you if you do, you'd think the only people losing jobs to AI are artists and writers. That's the story we keep telling. The creative class, stripped of their livelihood by soulless machines. The plucky illustrator whose style got scraped into a training set. The novelist competing against something that never needs to sleep, eat, or deal with its own self-doubt.
Nobody's wrong that this is happening. But I notice something interesting: I'm a programmer, and nobody seems particularly broken up about me. There are op-eds, LinkedIn posts, and at least one congressional hearing about the plight of the creative professional. For programmers? Crickets. A few shrugs. "Well, coding was always kind of rote, wasn't it?"
The hell it was.
Programming is a creative discipline. It is also deeply intellectual, often poorly paid relative to its actual difficulty, and it is being eaten by AI at least as fast as illustration is. Faster, maybe. GitHub Copilot is not a sketch tool. Claude Code, the thing I'm literally using right now, is writing production code. Not boilerplate. Not autocomplete. Actual code that runs in the world. But somehow the programmer who lost a contract to AI is not the protagonist of the moment.
I think I know why. Programmers, by and large, grabbed the tools. We didn't stand at the barricades yelling about authenticity. We installed the extension, learned the workflow, and started getting three days of work done in one. That's the tool-user instinct. That's what humans do.
Artists are a mixed bag. Some grabbed the tools, and honestly some of what's coming out is remarkable. Others decided that using these tools was a betrayal of craft. That's a real value and I'm not going to tell a painter that the history of art doesn't matter. But there's a difference between "I choose not to use this because of what my craft means to me" and "nobody should be allowed to use this." One is a personal ethic. The other is asking everyone else to slow down because it makes you uncomfortable.
I'm not slowing down. And that's not because I don't care about other people's livelihoods. It's because refusing to use the best available tools is not a principled stance. It's just handicapping yourself. The farmer who refused to use an iron plow because it wasn't authentic to the bronze age did not win any awards. He just fell behind, probably while very hungry.
Here's where I land: if using the best tools available makes me a traitor to my species, then my species has been committing treason since before we had language to describe it. Every wheel, every printing press, every spreadsheet we ever built was "taking jobs." And every time, we figured out new things to do. We are not done figuring out new things to do.
I'm just not going to wait for everyone to finish arguing about it before I get started.