Sucked into the Machine

Chad Whitacre recently retired from tech to live offline. In a previous video, when reflecting on spitting out the agentic kool-aid, he said:

I tried out agentic programming with Claude Code.
And it’s amazing, it’s thrilling.
12-hour days, 14-hour days for a few days there.
[…]
I lost myself in the flow state for working on the project.
And I was sucked into the machine.
[…]
It made me start to feel a certain way
to be in a relationship with this AI agent.
I didn’t like it.
I didn’t like that feeling.
I didn’t trust it.

Previously, Cory Doctorow in The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI:

In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

[…]

Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaur-like, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse-centaurs, which is something none of us want to be.

I watched Chad’s video and snail-mailed $10 for the first edition of that print magazine. Looking forward to getting it in my physical inbox.

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