No Man Is an Island

The author brings up several examples along the lines of: 'why write a blog post about how something was built' or 'why bother making a technical note public', or 'why bother writing a new language', etc, since the LLMs will just ingest it and never credit you and no one will know.

What this really points to is a new ecosystem which is now built on theft.

I agree, the depression is real, and it has destroyed the community of code as well as the individual spirit of wanting to do, well, anything. What's the point of building anything? Anyone could prompt an AI to get some result, there is no real intelligence necessary. But what has led to this situation? Theft. The plundering of all our collective work and all the intellectual effort that was put into it.

This became really clear to me today while I was playing around with the new Illustrator/Photoshop AI-coded ripoffs of the Adobe suite. (Excuse me, VectorCraft is an "open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Illustrator, rebuilt in pure Rust" per their Github).

I may loathe Adobe and wish I didn't have to pay them another dime. But there is a fundamental difference between a group of people sitting down to build a replacement for Illustrator (like e.g. Affinity), and someone prompting an AI to just rewrite Illustrator from scratch. The AI is laundering other people's work. The AI contains a compressed version of billions of lines of code, and from that it is unpacking essentially a pirated Frankenstein binary, washed of attribution. It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.

Imagine someone writes a book and you want to distribute it for free. If you reconstruct the book by taking random words clipped out of newspapers and pasted together, that's still a copy of the book.

The question is, what's anyone's motivation to write anything anymore? Who's going to write a new, better language? But we would not be in this situation except for the grand theft which allowed the creation of LLMs in the first place.

The whole John Donne meditation the title is referencing:

    No man is an island,
    Entire of itself;
    Every man is a piece of the continent,
    A part of the main.
    
    If a clod be washed away by the sea,
    Europe is the less,
    As well as if a promontory were:
    As well as if a manor of thy friend's
    Or of thine own were.
    
    Any man's death diminishes me,
    Because I am involved in mankind.
    And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
    It tolls for thee

(had to memorize it in High School, and its one of my favorites. It was written over 400 years ago and has aged quite well.)

This is well put and something I think a lot of us struggle with.

The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.

Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.

Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?

I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.

I think it’s a downward spiral:

-fewer people are asking questions because they’re asking AI instead or AI obviates the question by solving the challenge immediately.

-Asking a question is less likely to get you good answers because fewer people know the answers (or give you an AI response you could’ve generated yourself)

I really liked this. I've felt the exact thing the author is describing - I used to care a lot about my craft (iOS apps), and that has been blown apart by AI. Not that craft and taste isn't still a differentiator - I think it's just so much less satisfying to create something perfect over weeks, if you can get 80% of the way in an afternoon.

"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer. That private activity, in turn, sustains the community..."

I think a lot of the greatest art has been produced by this kind of "scene". Music for example isn't created only by an individual, it comes from listening and watching and playing with others. Later, you sit down and all of that input turns into something brand new.

I think at the same time I started getting "out of coding", I started getting deeper into music. And if it was just me, that would've been a short lived thing. But having people in real life to play with and bounce off makes it about 100x better and keeps you going long after you would've fallen off on your own.

I'd encourage anyone who feels this way to find something similar. The act of creation is still as essential as before, you just need to direct your energy toward something more purely human. Get into writing, drawing, woodworking... even as these things are instantly mass-producible, we'll still value and pay for humans to do them.

I think this has really softened the blow for me!

There's several things I disagree with in this post (a matter of perspective, I think):

> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.

I agree with the frustration here :)

> You design a revolutionary new programming language: who cares? Maybe Claude cares, for what that’s worth. But humans don’t write or even read the code anymore. The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.

Perhaps the people who weren't inclined to think about compilers, type systems, and logic before coding agents will never think about those things. If anything, I think about those systems significantly more now, because I view them as ways to describe the search space for the agent ... and perhaps, in the future, even tools to structure agentic latent representations.

So I propose rotating your viewport: yes, perhaps entertain the idea that it doesn't make sense to think about these things for human consumption ... but instead, what if we think of programming language and compiler design as being a tool to control the search space, and suddenly there's lots of new ways to think about these things.

Is this a valuable way to think? I'm not sure, but we should try and find out.

Yes. I've told a few friends and acquaintances that somehow AI is the least interesting technology in my lifetime - the boosters use AI to write about how they used AI to build new tools to help them AI their AI, the haters write (or sometimes, shockingly, use AI to write) about how AI will AI all of us. Have you tried this new skill? Read my research paper, it shows that AI can do good work unsupervised? Oh, yeah, that's interesting, what do you think about how it did X, Y, and Z? I dunno man, I didn't spend that much time on it.

It's getting lonely out there, even if or especially if you've converged on "I don't care much about AI".

I feel like your response to AI depends in part also how much you find the status quo stimulating and interesting. If you are a social butterfly like the OP and already embedded and happy with communities, then of course AI will be a big loss in contrast. I do much agree with his assessment of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, though.

LLMs actually _improved_ this for me, because they can be the sparring partner and the endless lexicon of interconnected thoughts, most other humans simply lack the ability to.

They do have their limits too, but I'd genuinely, objectively say that for me and how my brain is wired, they've given me the "community" context that the world could not really provide.

I do feel like I'm approaching the limits of what they can do there though. It's worse as soon as the things see the prompts of most public-facing harnesses, but even without that, they can only do so much.

Real humans would have a better intellectual community to offer, but for that, you actually need to find them first and hope that your schedules and energy budgets both align.

___

I think as much as we're seeing consequences of AI there, we're even more seeing the consequences of how society itself has been strip mined by big corps and big tech.

Human connection is dead not because of AI but because of Social Media.

Motivation is dead not because of AI or weakness but because spaces and contexts that would foster that have been replaced with corporate-approved standardized gray.

Globalization plays a role here. Atomization. Urbanization.

The expectation to hop around the nation for your job, nuking any ability at building a local community.

Context collapse glueing massive amounts over overhead on every single communication transmission.

Etc etc.

AI is often not a cause but just an accelerator.

Beautiful article. I am here to pick a nit and restate something that I've blabbed about here and elsewhere a few times before.

> Prompting is not a skill, at least, it’s a much shallower skill than software engineering. The instrumental dimension of the work has improved in that people can get more output per unit of effort, but the dimension of work that’s about building up human capital has collapsed.

I think that this is incorrect in a specific literal sense, but not in any way that changes the broader effect.

I think that "prompting" is in fact a deep skill, but not one that practically anyone has cultivated to any reasonable degree, for the simple reason that the tools change faster than anyone grip can acclimate to them.

Nobody on earth mastered the effective co-working with Sonnet 3.5. That model was a lightswitch moment for me personally. I built an agentic harness for it to convert a medium-large vue-class-component framework into vue-3's composition API, rescuing a personal project from certain doom of software rot.

I can say that I got a lot out of that model and that my own usage was (if I can say so) ahead of the curve. But with hindsight, I know that I barely scratched the surface of what it was capable of. Have I continued to hone my Sonnet 3.5 harness? Of course not. I have started over (or at least reset many assumptions) a dozen times since then. Even if I were so inclined - in the way that I am inclined to learn Chopin's Nocturnes - the model is now unavailable.

The ship has sailed.

So to the OP's point - it's not so much that skilled usage has disappeared, but that skills are self-obsoleting faster than any real degree of mastery can set in. And as an immediate consequence, the churn is too quick for anything resembling a relationship of apprenticeship. This is effectively a cultural singularity where, yes, we are each of us drifting much more alone.

This really speaks to me, and Terence Tao literally wrote something very similar few days ago [1] where he advocates for a more holistic approach to intellectual fields, and the value of community building.

On a personal level I had so many to-dos, like learning Rust "properly", but I feel incredibly demotivated now, because I can just get Opus or Sol to do it. But maybe I just need to block out one day a week to be my "no AI day", and just do it.

[1] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117395269325940185

"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer."

Aside from programming, one of my main interests is reading and writing. I think that literary fiction proves what the author is saying above. Even the most reclusive, private authors (Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, etc.) actually published their work. They contributed to the community and took part as readers. Literature is always in conversation with itself. And although literary fiction may seem not to have the sway it once did in society, it is flourishing among the people who care about it (like me).

My thoughts aren't fully formed, but I find it interesting to situate technical pursuits like software engineering with humanities. And anyway, I've always felt that programming is both a science and art.

I would wager that people who do mathematics for a hobby are not at all concerned about AI.

I'm a technical guy (physics background) who has let his math skills get mildly rusty (SW for a living). In the rare moments that I have time, I try to solve some math problems. That an LLM can solve them doesn't bother me in the least. The joy is not in the result, but in using one's brain to solve a "puzzle". I actually enjoy comparing my answer with the LLM's.

That a program could easily solve a crossword puzzle doesn't make them less fun.

That Deep Blue could beat anyone at chess didn't stop people from playing it. Ditto Go.

My friend (an actual math professor) still likes solving math puzzles and discussing them with me. So I'm not an island. I think the island issue is for people who like to discuss these things with strangers online. There will always be the annoying guy who'll use the LLM and "poison" the conversation. But if you have a community of people you know in person, it's less of a problem.

Math academics: Sure, I can see the worry. Hobbyists? Not really.

Software is a bit different, and always has been dichotomous. Some enjoy for the pleasure of brainstorming a solution, as well as exploring different modes of thinking, along with enjoying the elegance of their setups (be it algorithmic or build scripts or unit tests). Others enjoy programming for what it can do for them (the "result"). Of course, the intersection of the two sets is nonempty. For SW, I think the angst comes mostly from the first crowd.

I too am in the intersection, and it does suck. But long before LLMs came around, I had a big list of things I'd like to do in my life - not just SW - and knew I didn't have time to do even 10% of them. That doing certain types of SW is not fun any more isn't a big deal. I can work on other projects.

Some men are islands. I'm a bloody island; I'm bloody Ibiza.

How beautiful it is that the author gives a two-line summary of the post, right at the beginning:

> In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in turn makes private intellectual activity rarer.

I know now that it will be joyful to read it all.

> ...write blog posts to share ideas or inspire other people,...

Yeah, this is still there. I get a lot from other people's posts. VictorTaelin's memory system was pretty cool and I implemented a variant of it https://x.com/VictorTaelin/status/2081453432318132603?s=20

I write down what I learn mostly as a note to myself https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-10-03/AI_Updates

It's all fine. The world is just as good as it was before but we can do more. And Taelin's technique is pretty cool. It's just that some large amount of ideas I'd learned are now not unique and some new ideas are coming to exist.

Amazing read. AI indeed completely annihilated every other topic. You can go to any tech conference these days and anything that isn't related to AI just feels so irrelevant. It wasn't like this at all for crypto, NFT or any other hype topic of the day.

The premise here is that, “software engineering is solved.” That is not a valid statement. There is nothing to, “solve.” Engineering is a practice; not a game or puzzle with a solution. It is a way of developing software.

I take the view that we should continue to practice software engineering. Every time you let an LLM generate some code for you is one opportunity you’ve missed to flex your muscle. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Just as you can lose vocabulary and the ability to read over time: these are not skills inherent to us! They’re learned and they must be practiced or else they will disappear.

There are ways to use these systems, if you find them ethically agreeable, in the practice of software engineering. But it cannot replace it. That part is the shared legacy inherited and preserved by each of us practicing it.

Here's an analogy: People slowly developed skills on killing things; methods learned over thousands of hours and it is seen as a lifelong skill. These methods remain very useful for understanding the discipline of killing all of the various living things that need to be killed to sustain our modern world.

AI is a gun. Pulling the prompt trigger takes 99% of the effort out of the daily grind - point, shoot, reload.

Once the gun arrives, everyone that needs to kill is getting at least one gun. Use of the old knife, arrow, sword, etc. is downgraded from life skill to sport. The discipline remains intact, but just the parts needed to understand how it all is supposed to work remain useful. Nobody is getting paid to hunt with a sharp stick. Replace that stick with a rifle, and you've still got something.

I don't disagree that the community of software engineering will diminish. What was once a skilled trade is now an unskilled trade.

But I think the intellectual activity will just migrate somewhere else, once all the dust has settled.

People who are intrinsically motivated will continue to be intrinsically motivated and new communities will pop up around new domains.

Coding only came into being 70 years ago. It's not some fundamental human institution.

We're all just going to have to adapt. The wheel turns.

Very well written. I tend to forget how important the people around me are, and as you say, force myself to act with the "high status" intrinsic motivation.

Recently, I'm in a context with extremely talented people I respect and want to impress to some extent. The difference is night and day

I used to get calls often from my friends to ask me questions about my area of expertise. Not urgent things, just friendly "hey--what if..." kinds of questions.

Without the question, they might have never called. But because they called, we usually ended up just talking about other things too. Life. Girls. Work.

I rarely get calls like that anymore. It breaks my heart.

For the last few years, me and my friend have been working on a toy problem together. It's a problem that the most recent wave of LLMs can almost certainly solve and probably even one-shot. We now realize that no one's going to read our paper if we ever decide to publish our work. But we still use our weekly meetings to talk about things and make little progress here and there, come up with new questions, etc. It's bittersweet.

The thesis that intellectual activity will disappear due to AI is similar to the flawed logic people use against taxing billionaires. "If you tax billionaires, then no one is going to want to work hard!"

In reality, we are programmed to compete and produce and climb the social hierarchy. Intellectual achievement and its use as a delineator in society is not going away anytime soon. Your blog post is active, living proof of this.

It's just shifting... likely to more and more things that signal "hey, this was definitely not produced by AI" such as the lack of capitalization of sentences which has caught on.

AI seems to be revealing a lot of people get into industries like software engineering or math for a base external validation of their intelligence through their pursuits. The author realizes this and kind of handwaves it away in the last paragraph with some spurious generalizations. If you're not someone who organizes their self-esteem around being "intellectually necessary", this and all the handwringing reads as nonsense. AI hasn't taken away understanding for its own sake, local usefulness, arbitrating taste, or pure play. It's not an existential threat to the human need for community - only to the temperaments of a certain, vocal, subset who will need to evolve.

The end result of this is either AI annihilates human value, and we become pets or are annihilated ourselves, or AI is restricted to never pass a certain level.

I agree that prompting is a much shallower skill than engineering, and I really hate the term “prompt engineering” since I feel it puts something that (by design) is easy to learn on the same level as something relatively hard to learn.

There is admittedly a bit of skill to use these tools, but they’re really not hard to use. For the most part Claude can decipher my typo’d-to-hell prompt and figure out what I want, and even if it gets it wrong the first time I can usually correct it. The hardest part is determining some objective test for Claude Code to test against and “anchor” it, but I still think that’s easier than writing a bunch of unit and integration tests.

I like these tools; I think Claude Code is very useful and even if I didn’t like it I would still use it because it’s clear that’s where the world is headed and I want to stay competitive.

For personal projects I actually care about, I still write code by hand. I do think I write better code than Claude but I would still do it by hand even if I didn’t, just because I realized I was losing my intuition about software because I was outsourcing to Claude for everything.

There are plenty of things that I am honestly fine losing my intuition with. I don’t really derive much enjoyment from reading dmesg logs, and I am more than happy to let a robot have its fun with that, but it can take the mathey shit from my cold dead hands now.

> The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.

If you believe this, you're in for a wild ride someday.

What about all the intellectual communities springing up around AI use?

I wonder if this mixes up cause and effect. I've been working on several projects with AI tools to satisfy my intellectual and aesthetic curiosity. But I'm reluctant to share them--to engage with the community--because of the toxic discourse around usage of these tools. "Sure, I could post this cute Go library I worked on with Claude to /r/golang, but people will probably just say 'AI SLOP' and downvote it."

I think there is high uncertainty of how the world will change. My personal plan has two arms.

1) Be at the top of applying AI. The frontier overestimates of how able the average person is of applying what’s possible now. I would hope that with my software I can make money for a couple of more years. I constantly test my ideas on how far I can scale them through AI and what angles could be not as easily replicated. I’m aware that the average knowledge is catching up and I’m not faster. One could argue that also the expectation of how a software works gets higher. So users have lower attention spans want customized landing pages and UX needs to be more visual intuitive. So part of the gain in downstream benefitting users.

2) You can argue very long about 1) and I have arguments for both sides. So far it works for me and the numbers are on my side, however on the other side my plan B or 2) in this case is getting ready for life outside. I’m going in front of the camera I’m improving my talking skills I’m try to learn to build things. If you want if all knowledge work is gone. It’s literally entertainment, work with your body, serving or selling. I personally like entertainment most of that.

I’ve been trying to predict and I’ve changed my mind often, so now I’m just saying I don’t really know how the world’s gonna change.

On AI and communication with others: before AI when joining a company, the first weeks was all about talking to team mates asking about the systems we own as a team, how things work, how to do X, how to get unstuck…

Nowadays you ask all of that to codex/claude. And it works. It’s a regression. I don’t mind spending 2h helping a colleague debugging an issue. It’s fun, it creates bonds and we both benefit from it (ofc my employer would think it’s a waste of time, but I couldn’t care less about what executive millionaires think)

".. unless his name is Madagascar."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AMqNG5KGaA&t=1s

Value of contributing/sharing small tools (< 5-10 thousands lines), that can be written by a LLM in an hour or two is perhaps too little to bother.

But it's still possible and useful to contribute (or to contribute to) complex well tested programs, that are just not reproducible in a weekend by a LLM.

Also organizing projects maybe in a form that makes them easy to reliably customize and extend by a LLM, if that's how the people will interact with open SW development in the future, may also be something useful.

Though I dunno what "complex" will mean in the future, if LLM can at the moment already write state of the art well tested C23 compliant re-targetable C compiler for various 16/8-bit MCUs, along with SW simulators, along with timing exact system verilog IP cores, for 5 different architectures, in two weekends on a cheap $100/mo. plan and it all just works. :) It's going to be hard.

ctrl+f "capitalism" :(

I really don't get how you could miss this one, but I should have empathy -- he's presumably one of today's 10,000. But jeez... blaming "open source software isn't compensated" and "blogs are bad, now" on AI is just... yeah.

Incredible blog post! I've been very much disagreeing with most mathematicians on this topic and also getting kind of annoyed at how ineloquent they are at getting to the point.

This on the other hand has actually kind of swayed me over? I think it's still a massive net-benefit for society but I resonated a lot with the author's feelings and I want to understand how to cope with them myself, perhaps by joining groups of people who are still interested in pure software (which AI is a part of now).

The -30IQ line in particular reminded me of DHH's ramblings on Twitter the past few days.

This is all good and full of great opinions but these are the same arguments used by artisans during the industrialization against machines. Does it matter really to hand over a large chunk of this work to AI, in the grand scheme of things? Not really. Most python apps were slop written by humans, the analogue of mass market goods. Same principle will apply here, high quality goods are still usually hand made even today. From a software standpoint, if you need something niche, max performance, max security or whatever you will probably hire the best humans instead of handing it over to Opus 7.8.

The wheels are in motion and there's pretty much nothing we can do to stop them.

> People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive.

I feel like you can write a parody of this for every lower->higher level language change that's happened throughout history. I know LLMs are bigger change than going from ASM->C but it rhymes, at least to me. And I've never liked C, I've used pointers a handful of times in college and then thankfully never had to think about it again. I work in higher-level languages and that's not a thing I need to concern myself with.

I'm sure that statement will encourage name calling by some people or gasps in horror by people who work in C or similar languages but I've never enjoyed them. I find technology, computers, and program languages all fascinating and enjoy learning the history of it. I enjoy things like the Crash Bandicoot blog series talking about all the tricks they had to do to get the game to run on underpowered hardware and a SDK that didn't know what it wanted to be (my own re-wording) but I don't pine to go back to those days.

I see LLMs as just a step up the stack and making it easier for more people to create. Will it create a loss of parts of the art of programming? Undoubtedly. But I imagine there is a long list of people who used to be really good at some aspect of programming that a higher-level language removed the need for, that happens. This is happening on a _much_ larger scale, no doubt but it's the same concept.

> We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left?

It's made a specific aspect of our contributions (the actual writing of the code) superfluous but it hasn't removed all the other contributions. Maybe you all are using better models than I am (doubtful, I'm using Claude too) but "Idea -> Implementation" is much faster but "Implementation -> Polished Version" still takes a human (for now), at least in my experience. The LLM still writes the code to get to a polished state but there are tons of little UI/UX things it does badly and needs my guidance on. And, more importantly, writing code was never the hardest part of my job really, it was things like taking requests from the business side and turning them working code. The LLM makes parts of that easier for sure. I love being able to brainstorm and kick ideas around so easily or knock out a POC in an afternoon. However, there is still plenty of "human work" that needs done. I'm sure this will shift further, nothing is ever "settled", but when that happens I'll be looking at the next layer of problems I can solve.

I like solving problems, and yes, the LLM has taken away a whole slew of problems that I used to have to solve myself but I still see an unending ocean of problems to address that will satisfy me the same way writing code used it.

Semi-related: I believe so many people are writing "Software Factories" because it's the "next" problem to solve. Many of us looked up one level in the stack and said, "cool, now that the code is handled, how can I automate/improve the pipelines around that". I feel like as an industry there are many of us who effectively have been working to automate our jobs further, at least as a "background process" in our day-to-day, all along. Now we have a different part of that workflow to automate.

I find this perspective to be narrow and uncurious. AI is disrupting community -- it is not utterly dissolving it. I see no evidence of that. So many, including the OP, see AI as separator, an entombing force, somehow a black hole of intellect. In reality it is an evolution of the search engine which connects, navigates and further constructs digital civilization.