I deleted a working function today.
It ran. It was clean. It was better written than the version in my head. I deleted it because it solved the problem the way that problem is usually solved, and I am not building a usual thing.
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That sounds arrogant.
AI knows more than me about almost everything you could name out loud. Syntax I’ve never touched. Tests I’d forget to write. The name of the algorithm I keep reinventing badly at one in the morning. Ask it anything with a documented answer and it beats me every time, without breathing hard.
But people keep mistaking for intelligence. What it actually has is the most complete record ever assembled of what usually comes next. A billion people typed things on the internet, and it learned the shape of the average sentence, the average function, the average opinion about the average situation. It is the most well read thing in history and it has never once been in the room.
I have been in the room.
I know how you’re going to react to this sentence, because I know who reads me. I know which line gets forwarded to a friend and which one makes you close the tab. I didn’t look that up. I learned it by saying the wrong thing to real people and watching their faces change in real time, which is a training process with a much smaller dataset and a much higher cost per sample.
And I know how the thing I’m building should be built, because I can see it, and it doesn’t exist yet, so there is nothing written about it anywhere. A model can remix everything that has been made. It cannot want something that hasn’t. Every suggestion it hands me is an argument for the world that already exists, voted on by everyone who already built there. Useful. Also the exact opposite of the job.
Then there’s the last one, the one I don’t negotiate on. When the thing is mine, I don’t hand off the choosing. Not because the output would be worse. Sometimes it would be better. But the taste is the product. Strip out the thousand small decisions that only I would have made and you’re left with something that works and belongs to nobody. I didn’t start building to end up with that.
Now the line I keep circling back to, the one that started all of this:
AI is only better than me at things I don’t know about.
Sit with it for a second. Its advantage over me is exactly, precisely the size of my ignorance. Not one inch wider. Everywhere I’ve actually done the work, it’s a fast assistant with no opinions. Everywhere I haven’t, it’s a god.
Which means the gap was never a fact about the machine. It’s a measurement of me.
That should feel like a threat and it doesn’t. It’s the most motivating thing I’ve thought all year. The list of things it beats me at is just a to-do list. It doesn’t get smarter about my life, my users, my product, my room. I get less outsourced. Every subject I learn properly, all the way down to the floor, comes off the board permanently.
It’ll be better than me tomorrow at more things than it is today. Fine. Those things are all sitting in the same pile, and the pile has a name, and the name is what I haven’t gotten to yet.
So I deleted the function. I wrote a worse one. Slower, uglier, a stupid name I’ll regret in six months. It does one thing the correct version would never do, and that one thing is the entire reason the product exists.
Nobody who uses it will know there was a cleaner version. No benchmark will catch it. No model would ever have suggested it.
I know.
