Five essays that all circle a similar question from different angles: what happens to your own thinking when you outsource the hard, effortful part of it.
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Starting in the Analog Domain: Stoyan Stefanov sees the same pattern in music composition and “vibe coding”: committing ideas to a computer too early makes the work take longer. He develops music through an idea, an instrument, and paper before opening notation software. A computer’s precision makes it a poor place for loose experiments and quick failures. His short essay makes a persuasive case for sketching before building.
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I Hated Writing Until I Learned There’s a Science to It: An engineering student who dreaded writing receives a paper covered in red ink from a graduate-student mentor. The marks turn out to be the ordinary shape of revision rather than a verdict on her competence. Treating writing as a skill with techniques, instead of an innate talent you either have or lack, offers a better model for anyone who thinks they are “just not a writer.”
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Don’t Let AI Write for You: Sebastian De Deyne shares a short passage from Alex Woods about the purpose of writing. The work increases the writer’s understanding before it helps the reader. In Woods’s analogy, letting an LLM do that work resembles paying somebody else to exercise: you receive an output but miss the strength that should come from the effort.
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What’s Wrong in My Thinking About Errors?: Om Malik follows up after two resilience-engineering researchers challenged his earlier distinction between forgivable human error and machine error. Their correction is precise: “human error” often closes an investigation before it finds the systemic cause. Anyone who has filed an incident under “operator error” and moved on will recognize the problem.
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Write Some Software, Give It Away for Free: This essay makes a quiet case for building software as self-exploration rather than as a route to a paycheck. Work made that way may avoid the user-hostile, value-extracting patterns that appear when every decision serves a financial result. The Hacker News discussion is divided between maintainers whose generosity attracted entitlement and those who experienced the opposite.