Andreas Zwinkau, a software architect who has written about compilers and engineering practice for years, answers the AI question the way most people actually experience it: not with a position paper, but with a list of feelings. Six of them, each argued in a few honest sentences. He notes he typed every word himself, using an LLM only as reviewer.
- Surprise — LLMs work “like gut feeling”: they generate one token at a time with no planning or reasoning algorithm inside. Yet planning and reasoning emerge anyway.
- Fear — the doom argument (a superintelligent AI inevitably destroys us) seems to have no flaw — and nobody seriously sandboxes these systems, because they are too useful with access.
- Disgust — AI crawlers and agents descend on open wikis and forums “like a locust plague,” making open web communities harder to sustain.
- Sadness — artists who already needed luck to make a living now compete with content that is cheaper and faster to generate.
- Anger — political systems seem unable to rein in capital, whether the issue is AI governance or AI’s environmental toll. He’d rather a democratic government hold that power than billionaires.
- Happiness — it is genuinely thrilling to watch software development be transformed in real time, and to generate code, images, and music that would never have existed otherwise.
The conclusion resists resolution: positive on a technological level, bleak on a societal level.
That split is the essay’s real contribution. Most AI commentary picks a side and defends it; this one holds both at once, and the tension is what feels true — especially to people who use these tools daily and still worry about what they’re doing to the web, to artists, and to who holds power. Short, unpretentious, and worth the three minutes.