It took me two weeks to finish writing an article titled "Spec-Driven Development: The new frontier of AI agents". And that's not counting the roughly one month I spent thinking about writing it in the first place.
Nowadays, with AI agents everywhere for every conceivable purpose, it's incredibly easy to write or talk about anything — just craft a prompt and "poof", your 10-page scientific article complete with charts, tables, and data is ready to go.
Not that I see any problem with using AI for that and other things; we already know what it's capable of. But if there's one thing I personally refuse to delegate to AI, it's my writing.
Not for any special reason, mind you — AI has already claimed a lot of things for itself, including another thing I always loved: programming.
Actually writing the code, line by line, thinking through function and variable names (still hard to this day). Spending hours and hours Googling a problem I didn't know how to solve, and then feeling that rush of victory when I finally found a 2012 StackOverflow comment from someone who'd hit the same wall and figured it out.
Anyway, that era is over. I'm not an "anti-AI" or "anti-progress" person — quite the opposite. Things need to evolve, and they should. AI took the task of writing code away from me, but it took it and did it better. I can still draw on all the knowledge I've built up over these long years and work alongside AI to accelerate my output and amplify the impact of my knowledge and code.
But not my writing. We were promised that AI would handle all the boring work so we could finally "rest in a grateful universe" — but that's not quite how it went. Just as writing is both a hobby and a way for me to crystallize my knowledge, other things serve that same role for other people: composing music, creating incredible art, and so on.
Today AI is capable of all that and much more.
But I won't be the one to hand over one of the few creative things I have left — writing, thinking through a subject, surfacing the knowledge I carry, not just technical knowledge but reflective thought, like what I'm doing right now.
I'm not a text expert. I'm not a professional writer. I have no published books (yet — who knows). I make writing mistakes, grammar mistakes, and plenty of others.
But unlike AI, which always seems to have the right answer:
"Yes, you're right. The real purpose of this is [...]. I can share more details with you about it, just ask!"
I am not always right, and I intend to keep making mistakes in my writing — spending weeks drafting and refining a technical article about something I've studied — because at the end of the day, I'll know the knowledge is mine, and that's something AI can't take away.
I've decided to start publishing texts I'd previously kept to myself — private, lost somewhere in my files.
If you'd like to follow along and discuss this and other reflections, stop by my website and my social profiles where I usually write:
- Medium: https://medium.com/@willAmaral
- Substack: https://substack.com/@willacosta