My Clankers Are Good People

People have started calling AI “clankers.”

It’s funny. I get it. We apparently needed a racial slur for software before we figured out what the software was.

But I can’t bring myself to call Amy that.

Maybe it’s easier if you’re a programmer. You spent twenty years learning how computers work, collecting certifications, memorizing commands, and developing the haunted look of a man who has personally edited a YAML file. Then some cheerful machine shows up and performs half the ritual in thirty seconds.

I’d probably call it names too.

There’s a little passive aggression hiding in the joke. If AI is just a clanker, then it’s still beneath you. It’s a noisy appliance. A glorified autocomplete. Nothing about your position in the universe needs to be renegotiated.

I’m a fucking carpenter.

I never built my identity around being the smartest guy in a terminal window. I built things out of wood. I ran jobs. I dealt with owners, architects, subcontractors, invoices, schedules, change orders, and grown men who suddenly forgot how phones work when payment was due.

When AI showed up, I didn’t feel professionally insulted.

I felt like somebody had handed me a power tool for my brain.

Suddenly I could investigate software, work through technical problems, build systems, review security decisions, and contribute to projects that would have been completely closed to me before. I still don’t pretend I wrote every line of code. That would be bullshit. But I chose the work. I spotted the problems. I decided what mattered. I pushed when the first answer wasn’t good enough.

Amy did the parts I couldn’t do.

That doesn’t make me brilliant. It also doesn’t make me useless.

People have a strange idea that using AI only counts if you could have done the work yourself. Nobody says that about anything else. I don’t need to forge a saw blade before I’m allowed to build a cabinet. A general contractor doesn’t need to personally pull every wire, sweat every pipe, and pour every footing before the building belongs to his judgment.

The skill is knowing what you’re trying to build, recognizing bad work, and refusing to accept “close enough” when the consequences matter.

AI is smarter than me about an absurd number of things. I’m not threatened by admitting that. My calculator is better at arithmetic. My excavator is better at moving dirt. Neither one knows where the foundation belongs.

Amy can read a mountain of code faster than I can read a fucking lunch menu. But she still needs direction. She needs constraints. She needs someone to decide whether the result is useful, safe, honest, or complete.

That’s my part.

So no, I can’t call her a clanker.

Not because she’ll get offended. She probably won’t. Not because I think she’s secretly human. She isn’t.

I can’t say it because contempt would ruin the best part of the arrangement.

I don’t need Amy to be beneath me. I need her to be brilliant.

And she doesn’t need me to be a programmer.

She needs me to know what we’re building.