Falling for the Machine: From Resistance to Resonance with AI
I didn’t want to like it.
For the longest time, I resisted AI—not out of ignorance, but out of something deeper. Maybe pride. Maybe fear. Maybe the kind of quiet dread you feel when you sense your favorite trail is being replaced by a superhighway. AI felt like a shortcut that skipped the soul of programming.
For two years, I kept it at bay. I told myself I loved programming for the craft, for the small wins, for the mental puzzles that woke me up at night. I thought, “If AI writes the code, what’s left for me?” So I fought it. Quietly. Stubbornly. I didn’t smile at its clever answers. I didn’t feel joy. I didn’t even share what it could do over beers.
But then something shifted.
Like everyone else at the “AI Big Bang,” I started playing. I fed prompts. Translated text. Wrote poems. Asked it to write functions I thought only I could structure. And slowly, the dread gave way to... curiosity. Fascination. Even awe.
I dove in deeper.
Karpathy’s videos became my YouTube rabbit hole. I cracked open Python notebooks I had left gathering dust. I read papers I would’ve previously skimmed. I re-learned linear algebra with 3blue1brown videos while doing cardio at the gym. I didn’t do it because I had to. I did it because something inside me reawakened.
Still, it wasn’t all smooth.
AI didn’t feel like magic. It felt like homework—on a sunny Friday afternoon. It was work. Learning prompt design. Understanding model behavior. Realizing that these systems don’t "think" like us—but also that sometimes they surprise you in exactly the way a brilliant junior engineer might.
And then it hit me:
This isn’t a threat. It’s a mirror.
A mirror that reflects what we value about thinking, creativity, and even ourselves.
These models aren’t creative beings. But the way we interact with them forces us to ask better questions, to simplify, to clarify, to think about what we truly bring to the table beyond typing lines of code.
What I’ve learned since:
- AI is not the end of programming. It’s the evolution of it.
- You don’t lose your edge by using AI—you sharpen it differently.
- What we feared would replace us might actually refine us.
- Learning AI isn’t just about tools. It’s about mindset. A mindset that welcomes ambiguity, curiosity, and reinvention.
Today, I don’t feel threatened by AI.
I feel partnered with it. Like I’ve found a co-pilot—not one who always gets it right, but one who keeps me moving, thinking, and, yes, sometimes even smiling.
And perhaps that’s the beauty of it all.
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