Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

I can’t say AI hasn’t changed how I work, it has. Instead of going to Google, vendor docs, or the manpage for whatever code or system I am working on I will ask Claude or Gemini to take a stab at building the initial pass of the code or to look up what some cryptic error code means for me. Or even a better way to write some code that I think can be more concise.

The key I think is I never let it make the final decisions for me. The workflow is always look up information > shows it to me > ask for permission to do the thing > do the thing.

But none of that is “changing everything” in the way executives and the Sam Altman’s of the world want to profess. It is just a sometimes more efficient for me way of doing the same thing I was doing before.

A lot of people I have seen that crow about how they are using AI to change their work lives are just doing really fancy Github workflows and actions to automate something they used to still do manually for some reason. They rarely are doing anything that couldn’t be done with the time to research and test without AI.