AI

I enjoy my morning routine. Get up, wake to the world through the phone, nibble on some breakfast, and sit down at the computer. I like to remind my sleepy brain what I was working on the night before, skim through my notes, get all that mental context ready for the day.

Then I take a shower and let the stream of water ease my mind into a calm, zen-like state, free to let the thinkless thoughts flow.

That’s usually when a brilliant idea will pop into my head. Or when I realize what I did wrong last night. Or when I come up with a better way forward.

If not in the shower, maybe it happens in my late-night slumber, solutions through a mess of vivid dreams. But whether dreamland or my morning shower, this is when important insights usually come to me.

Insights that depend on the depth of my work, the mental context I’ve developed working through the nuances. Insights that come from letting my brain sit with the problem, exploring it while I’m off doing other things. Insights that come to me in the shower.

Now, AIs are a powerful tool. They can achieve wonders. They can write code faster than I can. They can explore concepts in a fraction of the time and teach them to me. They can catch what I might miss. They can even rewrite my codebase from Python to Go and back.

But AIs don’t take showers.

They don’t sit and think about the problem after the code has been written. They don’t wake up at 3AM with a sudden realization. They don’t debate with themselves over the what-ifs and maybe-if-I’s. They don’t have a conversation over coffee or a read through a thread that sparks a sudden “ohhhh!” moment.

Their human could do all that. But their human hasn’t spent time with the code the way the AI did, didn’t internalize the decisions, weigh the trade-offs. Their human won’t know the code as well as the AI did in the moments it was writing it, just hours ago.

The code the AI has since forgotten.

That code now simply exists, a relic of a process, waiting to be learned all over again by people who didn’t write it. There’s nobody left who remembers the hundreds of tiny decisions that led to the way it is now. Nobody who struggled and theorized and debated their way to something finally ready for review. Nobody to call up and ask why it was done this way and not that way.

The great cognitive debt fallout felt from every layoff, now applied to every code change in the product.

Anyway.

Something I was thinking about in the shower.