When AI Quietly Makes You the Programmer

I get in arguments with people about their weekend "coding" projects. A manager will corner me on a video call, eyes wide, sharing their screen to show off an inventory tracking dashboard they spun up on Sunday using an AI coding assistant. "I built this in three hours," they say, clicking around the interface. "I don't even know React." Getting an idea out of your head and onto a screen in a single afternoon is a neat trick.

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Your Prompts Are a Portrait of You

I’m not going to dismiss the experience of someone who has made an attempt at using AI and written off the output as lowest-common-denominator generic slop. I am going to assume that a brain worm (all too common these days) was whispering into their ear some reductive argument that helped confirm that AI had no place in their life. I see two groups making this claim. The first hasn’t seriously used AI to create something.

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