Re: I’m done using AI

2026-08-13

It’s a refreshing breath of fresh air to read an article like this in the otherwise constant barrage of noise of AI content on social media.

Upon reflection, I've come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it.

This is absolutely spot on, and something I’ve noticed first hand as well. It’s no different in other art forms either. An AI generated song or poster just has no soul. That being said, there’s still some value to get out of AI without having to cross the soul-losing boundary.

In music production I’ll happily use an AI powered auto-mastering plugin to save me some time on the mastering busywork, but I wouldn’t touch Suno with a 10ft pole for creating the stem recordings going into the mix. I feel the same way about AI generated code. I too have tried going deep on AI-generating basically everything, and ran into the same problems Brett mentioned. It was no longer “my work” and because I lost the sense of ownership over it I intrinsically cared less about it. Similarly I also noticed I just feel no excitement whatsoever about something that somebody else vibe coded. On my end, I stopped using generative AI for implementing new work, but kept using it for alleviating some busywork.

I tried to use AI less at work, like only use it for trivial tasks, but that never really worked. I'd just fall back to using it for pretty much everything. It feels silly to type out a test when you can just have AI do all of it. For me, it feels like an all or nothing decision.

Getting sucked back in to the drug is a real problem with keeping this use it for some, but not all approach, that being said, I do feel like it’s the only way forwards. Maybe I’m just still in the don’t get left behind phase.