AI Is the Future: I Still Don't Like It

I use AI every week. I do not like it.

That is not a performance of humility, and it is not nostalgia for a time when typing git status felt like a personality trait. It is closer to resentment: the quiet kind you notice when you are twenty, ten years into writing code, and still trying to figure out what your edge is supposed to be.

The part I agree with

AI is the future in every practical sense I can name.

It will sit inside editors, CI, support, design, legal review, medicine, logistics, and whatever you ship next. Someone with no background can describe an app, get a scaffold, iterate in public, and land customers. That is real. It is also impressive.

I am not arguing that progress should stop because it hurts my feelings. I am not pretending the tools are useless. I use them because I am not the type of person who wants to fall behind while the ground moves.

The part that feels unfair

What bothers me is the redistribution of advantage.

There are people like me who taught themselves young, or paid serious money for college and university to learn the craft properly, or both. We spent years on syntax that did not matter yet, on debugging sessions that lasted until morning, on being bad in public until we were merely okay. That path was slow on purpose. Slowness was the tuition.

Now the same outcome (a working product, a deployed MVP, a plausible company) can arrive faster for someone who skipped the slow years. I am happy for them when it works. I still think it is unfair to the people who paid the old price.

“Replaced” is too dramatic a word for most of us. “Sped past” is closer. You can still be employable, still ship, still win. But the distance between “I know what I am doing” and “I can prompt my way there” keeps shrinking, and the second path keeps getting cheaper.

That does not erase skill. Good engineers still matter. Hard problems still exist. Yet the felt premium on having learned the hard way is thinner than it was two years ago, and I notice it.

Why I keep using it anyway

If you have been building since you were young, opting out is not a personality. It is a strategy with a shelf life.

I work on my own SaaS projects. I ship mobile apps. I am responsible for the whole stack, not a slice of someone else’s roadmap. Falling behind on tooling is not romantic; it is expensive.

So I use AI the way I use any other leverage: sparingly when it helps, aggressively when I am stuck, always with the understanding that I am trading something intangible for speed. I do not have to enjoy the trade.

What I am trying to remember

Fairness and progress rarely arrive together.

The industry has always rewarded people who showed up early to the next platform shift. This shift is bigger, faster, and more personal because it touches the thing I cared about most: the act of making software itself.

I can dislike that and still build. I can write this post and still open the same tools tomorrow. I can want a world where depth is valued without pretending the world is asking for depth alone.

If you learned the old way and feel behind: you are not crazy. The floor rose. Keep your taste, keep your debugging brain, keep shipping things only you would ship. Use the tools because the future is not waiting for your approval.

I just wish liking them was optional in a way it is not yet.