I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how people use AI. Or more accurately, how people rely on it. I treat ChatGPT like an accountant treats a calculator: punch numbers, get results, still own the spreadsheet. Most people now? They hand the wheel to a bot and call it “thinking.” That is not evolution. That is euthanasia of the mind.
The Compiler Was My Sensei
Back when I learned to code, every bracket was a blood oath. Miss a semicolon and the machine laughed in segmentation faults. You debugged by staring at stack traces until your eyes bled insight. You earned logic the hard way, line by line, crash by crash. Today a junior says “make me a login” and ships AI-spewed spaghetti that stores passwords in plaintext env vars. I can smell the client-side auth from across the PR. They cannot; it “works on their machine.”
Enter the Glue Coder
They wire APIs like LEGO, prompt frameworks into existence, and call it engineering. Ask them why the event loop blocks and they prompt harder. Sooner or later the LEGO tower collapses. They stand in the rubble holding a ChatGPT tab and zero clues.
Augmentation or Atrophy: Pick One
Augmentation: you know the algorithm, AI removes the drudgery. Atrophy: you accept the black box and pray. One keeps you in the driver’s seat. The other turns the tool into a cage.
Decision Making Snowflakes
It is not just code. People now ask a chatbot what to eat for lunch, whether to break up, if they should quit. Ambiguity is the new allergen. Remove the friction and you remove the growth. Thinking lives in the scar tissue.
The Moderation Farce
Ask how to build a safe kernel and you are blocked for “security.” Ask for a basic Flask app and sometimes it is censored because of “potential SQL injection tutorial.” Congratulations: we protected humanity by hiding:
SELECT * FROM users;Knowledge is not the virus. Irresponsibility is. The cure is not corporate blindfolds; it is adults who can read without adult supervision.
When the Classroom Becomes the Training Ground
Now the same pattern is hitting education. California State University just signed up nearly half a million students and sixty-thousand staff for “AI learning tools.” Translation: Big Tech gets a captive user base, and academia gets an auto-grader with a marketing budget.
On paper it sounds noble, teach AI literacy, modernize classrooms, prep the workforce. But in practice, it means students will learn to use a black box instead of building one. They will write prompts instead of programs. They will be told this is “the future,” while the infrastructure’s snatched up by a few corporate overlords with their own playbooks.
A university once taught you to question the system. Now the system provides the syllabus. That is not education; it is onboarding. When every campus runs on vendor AI, “learning” becomes one long beta test.
I run my own stack because I like knowing where my bits live. Maybe colleges should teach that kind of literacy too, the kind that asks who owns the data, who trains the model, and who gets the telemetry. Because when universities hand over the syllabus to AI vendors, they’re not just teaching tools, they’re teaching trust in someone else’s system.
My Mentoring Syllabus
Day 1: no AI, no frameworks, no mercy.
- Write
malloc()by hand. - Authenticate users server side or I delete your repo.
- Debug a race condition with
printfand prayer.
Rule #1: Morals over models. Rule #2: The CPU does not negotiate with feelings. Earn the scars, then and only then let the machine carry the water.
The Mirror, Not the Prophet
AI is a distorted funhouse mirror trained on humanity’s worst writing habits. It reflects every Reddit thread, every Stack Overflow answer, every dark corner recipe. Feed it garbage, get gourmet garbage. Treat it like a prophet and you worship your own echo. Treat it like a very fast idiot with a photographic memory and you stay in charge.
Final Warning
I don’t blame AI. I just miss curiosity.
Keep leaning on the wheelchair and one day the battery dies mid highway. You will be the passenger who forgot roads exist. Use the tool. Just do not let it use you.
AI can be a tool for progress, but only if we keep asking questions.
The wheelchair was supposed to move us forward. Somewhere along the way, we locked the brakes and called it progress.