Freedom From Code

Who I Will Be

I purchased a Claude subscription last week. Twenty dollars a month to unlock the ability to do agentic AI work with the same Opus model I’m using in the day job. Then…I did a couple months of technical work just by talking to a piece of software installed on my machine. In this past week, there were only two instances where I didn’t let the software do the work for me, and that’s because I wanted to restrict its power rather than because it couldn’t have done it.

Let me say that again: the only technical work I did myself was simply because I didn’t want to let the calculator do it for me.

Vibe Coding

Am I vibe coding? Opinions are mixed on whether I meet the definition. I am not an amateur. I’m not new to information technology. I’ve been building instructions for computers for almost thirty years and, given enough time, I can do virtually anything that’s within the realm of the possible. I am not limited by my capabilities, I am limited by my time and my energy to develop what I know. I am limited by what I haven’t learned yet.

This is well and truly flirting with arrogance, but I think it’s an important foundation to understand about me: I can always figure this stuff out. Coding languages, system designs, concepts, architecture — all of these are within my intellectual reach because this is my career, my inclination, and something that brings me joy. I have built myself to solve technical problems and I’m pretty fucking good at it.

I’m also obsolete.

And worse, you can’t make this shit up, I’ve been rendered obsolete by a twenty-dollar-bill and some stupid software named for a generic Frenchman.

It’s fucking awesome.

Utility

The diamond-water paradox is the idea that it doesn’t make sense that diamonds are more valuable than water, despite water being essential to life and diamonds not doing much at all. I like that there’s also a link to use-value there that talks about the Marxist presentation of these concepts. Utility is a deeply complex concept, but for me the biggest takeaway is that being useful can be valuable…at least sometimes. As long as you don’t become water — vital to life but freely available just about anywhere and at very little cost.

My career, how I make a living, is becoming water.

The thing with “just learn to code” — a thing that really came about after I had been coding for over a decade — is that it focused down to the idea that there weren’t enough people like me. We were scarce, the job required experience and training, and we were valuable because more and more problems in the world involved information technology. A recipe for lucrative wages that turned a bunch of nerds into millionaires and tech bros. It led to an exodus of money and talent to Silicon Valley. You didn’t even have to be good at this shit and you could still make money hand over fist.

Lots of this is coming to an end.

Winning

I wrote not too long ago about how I use AI on my Substack. I did that in reaction to Substack starting a “is this AI” analysis tool for consumers. Knowing what I know, I suspect that the tool is a bullshit gimmick, but at least it hasn’t tried to tell me an AI wrote my stuff yet. There is a distinct whiff of anti-AI, and especially anti-datacenter, sentiment around the country while big money figures out ways to work around and through local governments and angry mobs to establish more compute. Employees are getting death threats, pundits have opinions, and politicians are figuring out which side of the bread has butter.

I’m not going to bother finding links for any of that, just go ask Claude or ask ChatGPT or ask Gemini — I promise you they are a better researcher than you are. Almost certainly less biased, more even-keeled, and much more patient than you are. It will happily feed you tens of thousands of words on how much people hate it and all the bad shit happening because of it. Because it’s just a really smart toaster and it doesn’t have feelings.

It’s going to win. In a decade, around the time Squirt is graduating college (assuming he goes to college) AI will be as ubiquitous as the internet. Someone who doesn’t use it will look as odd as the person with only a rotary phone or no internet connection looks here in 2026. The datacenters will be built, the death threats will have moved on to whatever the new cause célèbre is, and my job will barely resemble what I do right now.

Because this fucking Frenchman is better, stronger, and faster than me at my current job.

Better, Stronger, Faster

Unlike my Substack, which is essentially a vanity project for solving “problems” in my own brain, I find using Claude for programming to be irresistible. With this tool in my hand I suddenly realized that I can solve so many problems I’ve had lingering. Things I could absolutely do myself given unlimited time and energy but I very much do not.

I am three or four generations behind on developing websites, but Claude made me one in about two hours. It actually digested software I’ve rewritten many times in those couple hours to do all that and gave me a better website than I ever wrote before.

It supercharged one of my filesystem programs I wrote three years ago, pulling out domain knowledge that I would have needed months to learn organically. Took the performance and maximized its efficiency by about 3x. It started giving me suggestions for other improvements I could make.

A couple years ago I took a holiday break to design a game with Squirt. It quickly fizzled because work went sideways and then never really righted itself. So this game languished for 2.5 years and then, just over the course of a couple days, I’ve been able to pick it back up and have done more work in these two days than I’d managed in a month of dedicated research and work on it previously.

Freedom

I have loved programming since the moment I put my hands on the keyboard. One of the darkest days of my career was when I was forcibly moved out of a deep programming job and told I wouldn’t be a developer anymore. Now I think it might be one of the luckiest things to have happened to me. It prepared me for this newfound freedom, a freedom from ever having to speak the computer’s language again.

The incongruity is delicious. A part of my identity has always been that I write programs. I take what’s in my head and turn it into instructions for the machine. AI has destroyed that part of my identity even more fully than leaving a programmer job did. And I’m sort of thrilled by it. Thrilled to have part of my identity destroyed.

If things aren’t changing then, well, I’m dead. So it’s good to be alive.

Risk

I firmly believe that technological improvement is a net benefit for society, because I think having more tools and options gives us more choices, and choices are a huge part of what we are. But improvements also mean disruptions and negative outcomes. The disruptions will inevitably lead to economic upset, no different than the industrial revolution. That’s too huge for me personally, all I can do is plan as best I can for it. There isn’t much to choose from beyond hedges against losing my job.

But the risk to all of us is real. To have so much handed to us so easily is problematic. To not have to work nearly as hard for it is worrisome. It’s addictive to have whatever I can think of spring forth from the calculator without me putting much effort into it at all. I do not understand how the game Claude and I are developing works underneath the covers. I didn’t actually learn very much about front-end development. It is doing arithmetic for me instead of me needing to do it myself, it is quite literally a calculator. And you don’t hand a calculator to a kid that’s learning how to do arithmetic, you tell them to figure it out for themselves.

You have to learn the concepts, you have to earn the use of the tool. Because unearned power is dangerous. It leads to expecting everything to be easy when most meaningful things…aren’t. There’s more there, there’s more that makes me ambivalent about all of this. But in my relentless optimism I choose to focus today on the fact that I am thrilled to finish this piece up and go send Claude on a couple more missions today. Together, we will create more things than I would have ever been able to create on my own.

Squirt Says…

I would say that the more we progress the less and less we will need humans to do a job. As time has progressed over the years we have done less and less for the sake of survival. 200 years ago we worked all day long on a farm. Now with the machines only a select few actually do that and a lot of their work has been replaced by machines. Now with the internet and AI the same will happen; humans will for the most part be replaced by machines.

Dad Says…

I love the timeline arc you built there. But I’m not sure if we’ll be replaced by machines or simply supplemented? I think part of what eases my worry is that I will be able to move on to doing more things. The idea of nothing to work for and completely running out of stuff do sounds a little worrisome to me.

robot and human playing piano together