Mine mine mine! If you seen it you know, the iconic seagull scene in Finding Nemo where the seagulls chirping.

With the rise of AI, there is an unsettling sense of what is “mine”. Did I create this, or did “AI” create this? My wife shared an article of a GP who used AI note taking tools for a few months and the response was mixed. There was a real sense of efficiency and productivity to not have to take notes, but the conclusion of the article was to walk away from AI. One phrase has stuck with me, to paraphrase “I looked back on my notes, and I was there, I proofed read them after, but they weren’t my own”. It is a largely unsettling thought. This was something they were part of, but there was a sense of detachment to the notes that should have been theirs.

There are similar thoughts and echoes for software engineers and code that has been written together with AI. We are not talking about one shot vibe coding, this is people taking the time to read and understand the code AI has written. A similar eerie commentary that as they look back at code and ponder “huh, did I write that”?

The question is does it matter? I think it does - to wrestle with the code, is to wrestle with the problem. Or maybe the better question is how do we effectively wrestle with problems when we aren’t so engaged with the code?