I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human | Wendy Liu

As intelligence itself becomes privatised by big tech, allowing your intellectual faculties to wither in service of inane bots seems a dangerous move

Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt the field of software development, I was learning to code the hard way.

It was the mid-2000s, and I was a child with unmonitored access to the family computer. With the help of a basic text editor program, I learned how to make websites – first basic, then increasingly complex – from scratch. The results were never as beautiful or polished as in my imagination, but I could live with that, because I was learning a craft. The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over arcane documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted.

Wendy Liu is a writer based in San Francisco and the author of