Don't Feel Bad About Using AI
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Andreas Kling wrote an article about Ladybird adopting Rust, with help from AI. It stood out to me because of this paragraph:
This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.
It's interesting because Kling goes out of the way to explain his AI usage. I think a lot of people feel this way - having to make sure that folks know you're not using AI for slop. Those who wage the great war against slop tend to have an air of superiority that makes you feel shame for using AI. This defensive posture - the need to justify the use of a tool - stems from a cultural narrative that frames AI as a shortcut for the lazy rather than a lever for the ambitious. But the shame surrounding AI is misplaced, rooted in a misunderstanding of how technology evolves and how human knowledge is meant to be shared.
Here are five reasons why using AI is nothing to be ashamed of:
The internet was founded on the principle of freely accessible information. The outrage over AI training models often relies on a rigid interpretation of copyright that runs counter to this original ethos. If the web was designed to democratize access to human knowledge, AI is simply the next iteration of that democratization. It is an engine that synthesizes the collective public output of humanity. Using it is not participating in theft; it is engaging with the ultimate distillation of our shared digital history.
Critics frequently cite the energy consumption of data centers as a reason to boycott AI. Yet, society readily accepts the massive ecological footprints of other ambitious human endeavors—like launching rockets into orbit or powering global financial systems—because they are implicitly understood as investments in the "greater good." AI demands significant resources, but it also offers unprecedented potential to solve macro-level problems, optimize logistics, and accelerate scientific discovery. The energy cost is an investment in a cognitive infrastructure that benefits humanity at scale.
The fear of "slop" assumes that AI operates autonomously to flood the world with mediocrity. As Kling’s experience demonstrates, high-quality output requires high-level human orchestration. AI does not replace the human mind; it acts as a compiler for human intent. True software craftsmanship is no longer just about manually typing every character of syntax; it is about architecture, logic, and directing agents to execute a vision. The shame belongs to those who output thoughtless work, regardless of whether they used a keyboard or a prompt to generate it.
There is a persistent, romanticized notion that "harder" means "better." When high-level programming languages first appeared, developers writing in Assembly viewed them with similar skepticism. Refusing to use AI out of a sense of purity is a false economy. Efficiency is not a sin, and leveraging the most powerful tools available to execute an idea faster and with fewer errors is the hallmark of a skilled professional, not a hack.
AI acts as a force multiplier, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for complex problem-solving. It allows an individual to act as an entire team, bridging the gap between a conceptual idea and a deployed reality. Making individuals feel ashamed for utilizing a tool that elevates their capabilities only serves to protect established monopolies and gatekeepers. Embracing AI is embracing a more level playing field where execution is limited only by imagination, not headcount.