I’ve been thinking about what it means to abstract the process of learning to an AI. You simply state the goal you want, and the entire journey of figuring it out is left to the LLM. This applies to any creative project, whether it’s coding, writing, or design. It’s as if the end product justifies the means, and the means is whatever the AI decides to do.
This path leads to a world where, in an attempt to push more and more of the process below AI’s abstraction layer, humans are relegated to a very thin slice at the top. We are only supposed to focus on what we want, not how or why. A little of the why, perhaps, but a core part of the joy in doing anything is the learning process itself—a journey of understanding that can never be fully captured by this outsourcing.
We are already seeing the cracks in the promise that AI will free us from mundane tasks so we can pursue more human, creative work. Instead of liberation, the expectation is simply more. If you’re a developer, you’re now expected to be a 50x developer. If you’re a creative writer, you’re expected to produce more content. The list goes on. The implicit message is, “Don’t spend time thinking about the how, or learning things deeply—just deliver more output.” It is the classic capitalist impulse to extract more, and it’s sad to see that, yet again, a new technological paradigm is being bent toward this purpose. Humans will be expected to produce more and more, while focusing less on the profound experience of what it means to truly engage with their work.
I suspect this is creating a new class hierarchy between those who are in the know and those who are not. Take a highly skilled software developer who, through decades of trial and error, failure and success, has cultivated a deep knowledge of how to program well. The way they feel, I suspect, is a kind of in-group, out-group defensiveness. They see these newcomers who think they can just prompt an AI to get the output that they themselves struggled so hard for. This isn’t real, they might think. This isn’t earned. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.
And in a sense, they are right. What they feel is their hard work, their creativity, and their entire learning process being diminished. They know deep down how valuable that journey was as a human experience, even when it was full of suffering and hardship. They see newcomers as people taking a shortcut, emulating a mastery they have not earned. But perhaps it’s just two different ways of looking at the same thing. What I feel is missing from the conversation is a focus on the human, emotional, and psychological aspects of what it will mean to do something in the world to come.