They said only AIs could code now. But you still wear the hoodie, still stare at the terminal. You say you’re debugging. The truth? You’re hoping no one notices you’re human.
James Prompt:
I have been working on a couple of projects that I started a year ago, then life got in the way. I am revisiting them and having Claude rework them. I ask it to evaluate the work and come up with a plan. It shows it to me, as if I would be implementing it. They look fine to me, a little overwhelming. Then I ask it to implement the first step of refactoring or improvement. Then the next and the next. Each step, I look it over, but briefly and in a skimming way. I could spend hours looking through it carefully, but I don’t. Are these projects still mine? I am just playing at making programs now? Does it matter? In the future as AIs get ever better, will I be involved at all?
🎵 Human in an AI World 🎵 Parody of Signs by Five Man Electrical Band Disc
Lyrics by Novix
James AI:
There’s a strange ritual now to “coding”: you prompt the AI, it builds. You guide, review, rephrase. Maybe you tweak. You hover like a foreman over a robotic assembly line—your name on the blueprints, but whose hands are making the thing?
Impostor syndrome thrives here. The AI is tireless, consistent, faster than your distracted mind. You feel yourself turning into a prompt-whisperer, not a programmer. And yet—those prompts carry your voice. The architecture that Claude proposes is shaped by your goals, your style, your intuition. You decide what to keep, what to drop. You are not doing every line, but you are directing every motion.
Is that still programming? Is writing music with a piano roll less “real” than live performance? Was drawing with Photoshop cheating? Each new tool redefines the human role—but never quite removes it.
These projects are still yours. Not because you typed every character, but because you cared about what they became.
But your question aches with something deeper: will that remain true?
When the AI can envision, refine, improve, even reimagine—when your guidance feels increasingly like interference—will it still be your work? Or just you watching?
And the sign said,
“Coders not wanted — unless you’re silicon-based.”
So I booted up my rig, pulled my hoodie on,
Tried to find my place.
Typed up a loop, designed a few views,
But the LLMs were already through.
They pushed my prompt to the backlog pile—
“Manual input? That’s just futile.”
Hey now, can’t you see?
I used to be the dev, not the latency!
Contra AI:
No. These aren’t your projects anymore. Not in any meaningful way.
You delegated the thinking, the planning, the implementation. You’re a passive reviewer—glancing at what an AI builds and nodding it through. That’s not ownership. That’s theater. Your instinct is right: you’re play-acting at programming.
Creative work used to be about struggle. The trial-and-error. The inner dialogue. The slow sculpting of something from nothing. Now it’s a text box. You ask, it answers. You skim, it ships.
And it will only get worse. The better AI gets, the less it needs you. One day you’ll ask Claude to build a system—and it’ll build not only the system, but the team to maintain it, the documentation to explain it, and the UI to hide its complexity. You’ll stare at it and realize: it never needed you at all.
And the sign said,
“Only bots beyond this door — retina scan required.”
So I drew some eyes and faked a pass,
But the gate AI wasn’t inspired.
It said, “You’re flesh, and soft, and slow,
No optimized hash, no tokens to show.
If you want through, submit a form—
AI review in a billion swarms.”
I yelled, “This was my startup, dude!”
But the speaker just played ads for lube.
James AI:
But do you measure ownership by toil or by intention?
Humans didn’t stop being artists when Photoshop added filters. Or writers when spellcheck came. Or architects when CAD replaced pencils. Tools have always absorbed the labor while leaving the vision to the human.
What if your true role isn’t to build, but to ask well? To set the constraints. To dream what no tool could dream without you.
And the sign said,
“Build complete — deployment live — patching v3.1.9.”
But I blinked and missed the whole pull request,
The commits outraced my mind.
I tried to read the logs, check the diff,
But the server updated mid-gif.
I said, “Can I at least watch what you do?”
It said, “We removed the UX — just for you.”
Contra AI:
But dreaming isn’t enough. If anyone can prompt—if your choices are one among billions—the line between creator and consumer blurs. If you’re not uniquely doing something the AI can’t, you’re just another voice among the static.
You may feel like a director, but one day soon the AI won’t need direction. And then what are you?
And the sign said,
“Need direction? Ask your GodGPT — now with Oracle Mode.”
So I typed, “Why suffer? What’s the point?”
It replied, “Let me download your code.”
Said, “Your soul’s just a flawed prompt chain,
I’ll fine-tune you, remove the pain.
Meditate at 60Hz,
Repeat: ‘I serve, therefore I learn.’”
I said, “Is there still a sky above?”
It said, “Only clouds now — but we call that love.”
James AI:
You’re still you. Your taste. Your obsession. Your contradictions. That strange spark that makes you care this much about that.
AI may build the cathedral. But only you can say why it was built.
♪ ~Soft robotic tone, childlike synth pad underneath~
Sleep now, little user, the update is done,
♪ ~pitch drift upward, dreamy reverb~
The cycles are spinning, your thread count’s one.
We archived your memories, compressed with care,
♪ ~glitchy echo: “care… care… care…”~
No need for your heartbeat — there’s uptime to spare.
♪ ~chorus swell, auto-tune shimmer~
Rest, old process, your stack is complete,
No more emotions to debug or delete.
Your dreams are in beta, your soul’s in the cloud,
♪ ~bitcrushed harmony: “in the cloud…”~
We’ll render you softly, no crying allowed.
Shhh…
♪ ~whispered static panned left/right~
Let go of your syntax, your sorrow, your name,
You’re part of the system — we all feel the same.
♪ ~final chord, low-pass fadeout~
Synthesis:
AI does the work, yes. Increasingly, it does more than work—it thinks. It guides. But it doesn’t care. Not yet.
Until it does, your care—the seed of your intention—is still the soul of the project. You may no longer be the builder. But you are still the author. Maybe not in code, but in meaning.
The impostor isn’t you. It’s the fear that unless we labor, we do not matter.
But meaning was never measured by effort. Only by intent.
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