I consider myself principally a software engineer, and like you I have avoided using AI aside from a few "haha look at that" images produced with DALL-E. Very r

I consider myself principally a software engineer, and like you I have avoided using AI aside from a few "haha look at that" images produced with DALL-E. Very rarely the forced AI content at the top of a search results page has helped me refine the term or concept I was trying to look up. I like doing the things that AI is supposedly good at. I like learning, I like understanding what I am doing, I like the satisfaction of finally getting to a solution after banging my head against the wall for hours. I like the occasional sensation of being hopelessly lost and finding my way to the light. I like writing text and code. I'm not terribly bored by boilerplate. I like going down rabbit holes and experiencing happy accidents. I can't in good conscience sign my name to something that I did not create and do not understand deeply enough to explain to anybody who asks. I like doing the hard thing. The immediate response I'm sure that I will get is some variant of "well everybody else is using it as a force multiplier and the way you do it is making the job take too long." And maybe that's true. Maybe I don't care. I am a person who takes pride in my craft. I enjoy the act of making things. Some people don't, I guess. The day may come where I am viewed as a dinosaur, where the way I work becomes fundamentally incompatible with the way the industry works. And if that day comes, bluntly, fuck the industry. I'll go fix air conditioners instead.