AI and Authorship

I’ve been using AI for coding pretty extensively recently. I know that I still consider myself a programmer.

How do I square that circle?

I’m looking at the design of the systems as the creative part of the process. Most of the coding itself is akin to ditch digging. You know what you have to do, and roughly how to do it… and from there it’s just writing it down. For me, something like Claude is like a smart and fast jr. developer I can give instructions to have have them do their thing. Once they’re done, I look it over and suggest improvements.

At the end of the day, I’m still the programmer that made the system work. The lines of code are secondary to my vision of how things should work.

But then you have the question of “why don’t you use AI to do your writing?” Writing as in things like this post, or my book, or whatever.

Writing, for me, is the expression itself. I can use spellcheck. I can use AI to maybe provide feedback or to judge the tone or whatever, but if I’m claiming authorship of the end result, I feel that I should be the entity writing it.

Maybe it’s a weird way of thinking, but it’s working for me.