Claude Didn't Write This

Something's been bothering me about the promise of AI. Creating is often a transformative process for the creator. They make sense of something, process something, express something, achieve clarity on an aspect of their life or work. Outsourcing the direct act of creation to AI defeats this purpose.

I am a musician, but I count a lot of software engineering as creation too. As AI models and tools get better, and my team and I use these tools more adeptly, I've felt a shift start to happen. People (myself included) are saying "Claude did a good job on X" or "The AI work that Max did for Y". The person driving the creation is getting less credit. I worked very hard on using AI to achieve Y, but what I actually created was the context for the AI to achieve Y, not Y itself.

This feels strange. I jokingly referred to my colleague as a "Staff Harness Engineer" yesterday. And myself as a "Harness Engineering Manager". But I think this will become more and more true with each model drop. And we will move further and further away from being the direct creator of value to our users. Again, this feels strange. Uncomfortable even. I didn't get this feeling when I used AI to prototype or explore different architectures, write some basic functions and boilerplate, even write internal tools to automate manual busywork. It's exciting to get more done, and do things you didn't have time for before. But the closer I get to no slop 1 shot PR stacks that implement a complex feature, the greater this feeling becomes.

Coming back to music and creative expression, I can totally see myself using Suno and other tools to explore different ideas. Do a rough draft even. But not wholesale write a song for me, no matter how good the resulting artefact. Because the transformation within me that happens when I clearly express an emotion, feeling, memory, person… that is impossible to achieve when AI does everything for you. And that's why I write music these days (and why I started writing music in the first place).

I'm still thinking about this a lot, and probably will be for a long time to come. But I'm converging on the following: the closer the creation is to what matters to you, the more you should be doing the direct creative work to bring it to life. That doesn't mean avoiding AI. You can use AI as an input to your thinking and creating, and this can actually bring about more direct and deep transformation. Just don't use it as a replacement for thinking and creating. Because for these cases, the transformation is the point. You don't want to create the thing, you want to become the person who created the thing.

Through writing this post, I became the person that wrote this post. If Claude wrote it for me, what did I become?