Copilot isn’t that. It’s just the ghost of a thousand blog posts and cocky stack-overflow posts whispering, “Hey, I saw this once. With my eyes. Which means it’s good code. Let’s deploy it.” Then vanishing when the app hits production and the landing gear won’t come down.
First things first: I like to code. Not supervise. Not hover over a synthetic lobotomized chatbot like some drooling silicon intern trying to remember what
std::moveactually does. I don’t want to be the meatbag middle-manager reviewing some neural net’s fever dream of aswitchstatement. I want to build shit. Real shit. Weird shit. Systems that are *on fire* type shit.
AI isn’t helping you build something novel. It can’t. It only knows what’s been done before. It’s autocomplete with a superiority complex.
You want real connection to code? You earn that. You dig in. You wrestle with segfaults at 3 in the morning. You pace your apartment muttering about pointer arithmetic. You burn through Handmade Hero until you get it. You write your own damn notes instead of snapping lecture slides and pretending it counts. When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning. You become a conduit for a mechanical bird regurgitating it’s hunt directly into your baby-bird mouth. You don’t know your code. You’re babysitting it.
The problem isn’t just laziness. It’s degradation. Engineers stop exploring. Stop improving. Stop caring. One more layer of abstraction. One more lazy fetch call inside a render loop. Eventually, you’re living in a cathedral of technical debt, and every user pays. Milliseconds at a time, seconds at a time, each click a tax on your apathy. 50 million users have an extra 3 seconds of unnecessary lag in a day because you wanted to hit tab rather than write code? That’s nearly 5 years of cumulative wasted time.
The thing will feed you trash. It’ll feed you fake wisdom from fake people and beg you to trust it. But if you want to make a fast, beautiful system - if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks - you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn.
The thing I hate the most about AI and it’s ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul… Brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots.
Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard, born to be great, is going to get told to “review this AI-generated patchset” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.