Edited on 5/28/2026: I originally wrote this in a passionate fury, and didn’t properly convey what I want to say. I’ve adjusted for clarity and removed some parts I think were overly dramatic.

I love programming, and each year it feels like I’ve just now started getting good at it. I’m not on board with people trying to convince me I’ll be sooooo much more productive if I use AI to do programming, or even left behind if I don’t fall in line.

Learning and improving and getting better at programming and creating software brings me the most joy out of any hobby. And I don’t want to just be good or great, I want to be amazing, I want to be the best. I have absolutely zero interest in sacrificing my ability to learn so that I can maybe produce more lines of code in a shorter amount of time. The supposed pros do not outweigh the cons for me.

Being able to create software independently (not via a subscription to a massive corporation that trains and hosts models) is such an incredibly powerful ability. Free and accessible software raises the standard of quality that corporations have to meet with their own proprietary products. We should not willingly cede control of this ability to technofascist corporations. We should tell them to get bent, and make better alternatives to their sofware. We should be defending the freedoms of everyone when corporate interests lobby against our rights so they can make more money off of spying on us. We should be striving to create for the good of all humans instead of just for ourselves. We should raise the bottom line for humanity.