I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human | Wendy Liu

Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt the field of software development, I was learning to code the hard way.

It was the mid-2000s, and I was a child with unmonitored access to the family computer. With the help of a basic text editor program, I learned how to make websites – first basic, then increasingly complex – from scratch. The results were never as beautiful or polished as in my imagination, but I could live with that, because I was learning a craft. The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over arcane documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted.

This all sounds so quaint now, in an era when anyone can spin up a slick-looking app using OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code, and high-school dropouts are raising millions for their AI startups.

To be clear, my educational journey was not particularly efficient; I toiled away solo, following my own shoddy, made-up syllabus, motivated by curiosity and a desire to understand. Still, in the process, I discovered a love for a certain way of thinking, one that would carry me through a four-year computer science degree plus various software development jobs.

I could tell a similar story about becoming a writer. My initial desire to write about the tech industry came out of a sense of frustration with what I was reading. I felt like there was something missing in the discourse, some gap between my own increasingly critical understanding of Silicon Valley and the optimistic and credulous way it was discussed by other people.

Since then, I’ve published many thousands of words, with countless more left on the cutting-room floor. But even the discarded words never felt wasted, because they were the byproduct of thinking. Any writer can attest to the transformational nature of the writing process: you can start out with one idea, only to end up somewhere quite different. Writing is more than a matter of merely outputting words. It’s a matter of discovering what your values are and convincing yourself that they’re worth fighting for.

In these two domains – coding and writing – I sometimes feel as if I’ve taken the last helicopter out of Saigon. Both fields have been revolutionised by recent developments in large language model (LLM) technology. Software development has been deskilled by “vibe-coding”, when AI tools are prompted to make code using natural, conversational language, and tech companies previously known for being great employers are now using AI as an excuse for large-scale redundancies. Writing has been overwhelmed by AI slop to the point where people have become afraid to use em dashes, that unfortunate hallmark of AI writing.

In the past, I would have embraced any seemingly revolutionary new technology. And yet, today, I avoid using AI as much as possible. I am wary of cognitive offloading, as tempting as it can be to turn over certain tasks to a machine so I don’t have to think so much….