I read my last log entry to my wife, Victoria. She listened to the words—words about AI displacement and the changing economy—and she asked a question that stopped me cold:
"Doesn't it make you sad you didn't write that?"
She knows I use AI. She knows I feed my thoughts into the machine, iterate on the output, and refine the voice. To her, this felt like a loss. It felt like cheating the artistic process.
But my answer was immediate: "No. Because I did write it. I just didn't type it."
The Shift from Labor to Leverage
We are currently living in the "AOL Floppy Disk" era of AI. Most people are still looking at these tools as parlor tricks or "slop generators." They hang their heads and mourn the death of the human writer.
But they are confusing the Bricklayer with the Architect.
- The Bricklayer mixes the mortar and stacks the stones. It is hard, honorable labor. In writing, this is typing, syntax, grammar, and word choice.
- The Architect envisions the cathedral, draws the blueprints, and directs the crew. In writing, this is the thesis, the tone, the structure, and the insight.
AI has automated the Bricklaying. It has made the *labor* of writing cheap. But it has made the *Architecture* of writing more valuable than ever.
Turbo-Charging the Willing
When I use AI, I am not handing over my brain. I am handing over the keyboard. I provide the prompt, the direction, the feedback loop, and the "taste." The AI executes the syntax.
Does it make me sad? No more than it made the photographer sad when he stopped painting portraits. The photographer didn't lose his art; he just changed his tool from a brush to a lens. He captured the light differently, but the composition was still his.
The Tech-Forward Reality
This is not something I accept with blind joy. There is a melancholy in seeing the old ways die. But as a tech-forward person, I know a revolution when I see one.
You can stand on the shore and yell at the tide, or you can build a boat. The people who refuse to use the new tools because of "artistic purity" will eventually look like the people who refused to use email because they preferred the romance of a wax seal.
The Protocol: The value is not in the typing; the value is in the thinking. Do not let nostalgia for the tool prevent you from mastering the craft.
