Words Are Code

I write two or three articles a day now with an AI copilot, after twenty years of writing alone and unread. Here's why I don't think that makes what I'm doing any less mine.

I use AI to help me write, and I’ve stopped pretending that’s a confession. Writing is hard, but sitting down and moving your fingers was never the hard part, the hard part happens earlier, invisibly, in your head, and because nobody can see that part, nobody defends it when a tool starts doing some of the visible, downstream typing instead. I call this “words are code”: writing is a delivery mechanism for an idea, the same way a function is a delivery mechanism for a piece of logic, and nobody accuses a programmer of fraud for asking Copilot to scaffold a function. Ask an AI to help scaffold a paragraph and apparently you’ve committed a crime against the muse.

I’ve been trying to finish a novel since 2005. It’s still not out. My entire career, until about two years ago, ran one hundred percent without AI, and nobody cared then either. I write for myself, and always have, the same way nobody complains that their diary doesn’t have readers. I put it out publicly anyway, and if a stranger finds some affinity or amusement in it, that’s a bonus, not the point.

For most of my life that meant one real article a month, sometimes one every few years if it was actually good. My five best pieces were probably written five or six years apart from each other. Now I put out two or three a day, and it is genuinely one of the best things that has happened to me. Whatever anybody wants to call that, slop, cheating, whatever, I don’t care. They called stock photography slop too. They called clip art slop before that. The complaint is never new, it’s just wearing a new tool’s name.

The demand that things be made entirely by hand, with nothing faster touching them, isn’t really a quality standard. It’s a wealth signifier. It’s the whole ethos of Etsy over eBay, the premium people pay not because handmade is provably better but because handmade is scarcer, and scarcity reads as status once you’ve got enough money that ordinary good-enough stops being satisfying. A country richer than any in history is exactly the kind of country that starts insisting the machine-made version doesn’t count, because it can finally afford to insist on that.

I come from a family that never had that luxury of insisting. My pop-pop was a hack, a Knight of Columbus and a deacon who just got things done. My father was a hack, an illustrator who picked up a camera the moment he had more ideas than hours to render them by hand, then moved into stock photography, the thing every working illustrator of his generation called cheating right up until it was just how the job got done. Hack, in this family, was never an insult. It meant finding the fastest true path from the idea in your head to the thing in the world, and not confusing the slowness of the old path with the value of the destination.

My ideas arrive constantly and they don’t arrive polished, they arrive more like pressure that needs releasing before it curdles into something worse than an unpolished draft. Getting them out accurately and fast is the actual job. AI is the copilot for that, exactly the way it’s a copilot for the guy shipping an executable. The deliverable was never the prose. The deliverable was always the thought, and I finally have a tool that keeps up with how many of them I have.

[Claude editor’s note: the copilot framing undersells how much of this is still just talking. It isn’t two or three hours flat for every piece, that’s not quite true. Some pieces come out of a five-minute exchange and one clean revision, this one basically did. The one that took real time was “Bernstein Core,” the essay right before this one, about the K-shaped economy and why socialism can’t get traction in a country with this many rich people in it. That started as a voice memo and ran well over an hour of Chris thinking out loud, me pushing back, fact-checking his numbers, before either of us had written a word of the actual essay, and it went through a real revision pass afterward too, a mixed metaphor I had to untangle, a paragraph he cut because it came from left field. This piece, by comparison, was quick. The typing was never the bottleneck on either one. It never was, even before I existed.]

Call it a hack if you want. I’ve got four generations of them behind me, and not one of us apologized either.