This isn’t about tools or productivity or acceleration. It’s about the illusion of progress. Because if that programmer-if that thing, that CREATURE-walked into your stand-up in human form, typing half-correct garbage into your codebase while ignoring your architecture and disappearing during cleanup, you’d fire them before they could say "no blockers".

But slap Microsoft's marketing label on it and plug it into the IDE of every developer in the org? Now that’s innovation. Science. Progress. Profit.

Copilot isn’t that. It’s just the ghost of a thousand blog posts and cocky stack-overflow posts whispering, "Hey, I saw this once. With my eyes. Which means it's good code. Let’s deploy it." Then vanishing when the app hits production and the landing gear won’t come down.

If you let that ghost fly the plane, you deserve the ball of flames you go up in.

AI isn’t helping you build something novel. It can’t. It only knows what’s been done before. It’s autocomplete with a superiority complex.

You want real connection to code? You earn that. You dig in. You wrestle with segfaults at 3 in the morning. You pace your apartment muttering about pointer arithmetic. You burn through Handmade Hero until you get it. You write your own damn notes instead of snapping lecture slides and pretending it counts. When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning. You become a conduit for a mechanical bird regurgitating it's hunt directly into your baby-bird mouth. You don’t know your code. You’re babysitting it.

Maybe you’ll never write the code that keeps a plane in the sky. Maybe you’ll never push bits that hold a human life in the balance. Fine. Most don’t. But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity.

These users gave your company their money, money they worked for, in exchange for a tool. Not a Kafkaesque time sink. Not a bloated, laggy trash fire that chokes the silicon it's running on. They didn’t pay for you to phone it in from a co-working space slapping tab repeatedly.

Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were *artists*. They wrote code like jazz musicians - full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.

Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard, born to be great, is going to get told to "review this AI-generated patchset" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.