I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It's what makes us human | Wendy Liu

In the mid-2000s, learning to code involved building websites from scratch using a basic text editor and unmonitored access to a family computer. Early results were not polished, but debugging and reading difficult documentation felt like learning a craft. The process was not efficient and relied on a self-made syllabus, yet it developed a way of thinking that supported later study and software work. A similar path appeared in writing, driven by frustration with how the tech industry was discussed. Writing produced many drafts and discarded words, which still mattered because they were byproducts of thinking and could transform initial ideas into different conclusions.

"Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt the field of software development, I was learning to code the hard way. It was the mid-2000s, and I was a child with unmonitored access to the family computer. With the help of a basic text editor program, I learned how to make websites first basic, then increasingly complex from scratch. The results were never as beautiful or polished as in my imagination, but I could live with that, because I was learning a craft."

"The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over arcane documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted. This all sounds so quaint now, in an era when anyone can spin up a slick-looking app using OpenAI's Codex or Anthropic's Claude Code, and high-school dropouts are raising millions for their AI startups. To be clear, my educational journey was not particularly efficient; I toiled away solo, following my own shoddy, made-up syllabus, motivated by curiosity and a desire to understand."

"Still, in the process, I discovered a love for a certain way of thinking, one that would carry me through a four-year computer science degree plus various software development jobs. I could tell a similar story about becoming a writer. My initial desire to write about the tech industry came out of a sense of frustration with what I was reading. I felt like there was something missing in the discourse, some gap between my own increasingly critical understanding of Silicon Valley and the optimistic and credulous way it was discussed by other people."

"Since then, I've published many thousands of words, with countless more left on the cutting-room floor. But even the discarded words never felt wasted, because they were the byproduct of thinking. Any writer can attest to the transformational nature of the writing process: you can start out with one idea, only to end up somewhere quite different. Writing is more than a matter of merely outputting words. It's a matter of disco"

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