Yesterday the moderators of r/opensource, a community of about 392,000 people, banned any project that "uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI." By the afternoon there was a revolt, a rival subreddit, and a pile of people pointing out that the Linux kernel takes AI-assisted code now. I don't think the rule will survive the week. The instinct behind it is another matter, because plenty of us have felt it.
Five fears wearing one coat
When someone says they're afraid of AI, they usually mean several things at once. Pulling them apart helps.
Losing the work
This one has numbers. A Resume.org survey of nearly 1,000 US business leaders found 21% of companies have already frozen entry-level hiring because of AI, and a Mercer report says 99% of the executives it surveyed expect AI to shrink headcount within two years. I'm getting some of these figures secondhand, so check the originals before you quote me. The direction is hard to argue with anyway. The bottom rung of the ladder is getting sawed off, and everyone standing higher up should care, because senior engineers don't appear out of nowhere.
Losing the commons
That's the r/opensource fear. Maintainers are drowning in pull requests that look plausible and that nobody fully understands. GCC said in July it will reject substantial AI-generated contributions, citing the legal footing of free software. OpenJDK did something similar in April, pointing at reviewer burden, security and unclear IP. Codeberg members voted 358 to 144 to ban mostly AI-generated repositories. LLVM went the other way and asked for disclosure and a human in the loop. When serious projects reach opposite answers to the same problem, nobody has the answer yet.
Harm
Character.AI filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, after lawsuits from families who say its chatbots contributed to teen suicides and self-harm. Whatever happens with those cases, nobody can call the risk abstract anymore.
The rising cost of literally everything
"Everything" is a stretch, but it's how it feels when the increases show up in places you didn't expect.
Start with the power bill. Goldman Sachs estimated residential electricity prices rose 6.9% in 2025, more than double headline inflation, and expects the climb to continue as data centers soak up demand. Penn State researchers make the sharper point that grid upgrade costs get spread across all customers, so your household can help pay for a build-out you never use. The evidence isn't all one way. An EPRI working paper found data center capacity was linked to lower average prices between 2015 and 2024. That covers an earlier, smaller era, and who pays from here is being fought over state by state.
Then there's the hardware. Memory makers have been shifting capacity toward the chips AI servers need, which leaves less for the rest of us. Tom's Hardware reports the surge is cooling, but AI demand still has DRAM and NAND prices climbing through the third quarter. If you've priced out a laptop or a build lately, you've felt it.
Voters are already reacting. In that CNBC survey, 63% opposed an AI data center within 10 miles of their home and only 13% supported one, with power bills and water use leading the complaints. That's not a technophobic crowd. It's people asking who gets the benefit and who gets the invoice.
The people steering
Axios reports that executives at OpenAI, Anthropic and others are preparing for backlash after a possible catastrophic AI event. OpenAI says it runs preparedness exercises and doesn't consider those scenarios inevitable. Fine. I still find it odd to learn the industry is rehearsing for the bad day.
Are they founded?
Most of them, yes, though not equally.
The jobs fear holds up, and its shape matters. A Stanford study, as secondary sources summarize it, found employment for young workers in the most exposed roles fell about 13% relative to others, while senior people were mostly untouched. If that's right, the danger for most of us isn't getting fired next Tuesday. The people coming up behind us never get the reps that made us any good.
The open source fear is right about provenance and workload and shaky about purity. A rule against anything "intended for AI" would also catch something like automatic captioning, and the moderators have already said they'll enforce it with some nuance. A rule that needs an exception list within 48 hours was written angry. That doesn't make the anger wrong.
The harm fear is the one I'd lose sleep over, especially for anything that talks to a lonely person at 2 a.m.
The fear I'd drop is "it's all a bubble and will vanish." TechCrunch already keeps a running graveyard of AI projects that didn't make it. Startups die. The web had a graveyard too, and the web stuck around.
Is it too late?
If you mean staying out entirely, probably. AI is in search results, in the email client, in the code review tool, in the support queue. Opting out of all of it means opting out of most of your job and a good chunk of your phone.
But "too late to avoid it" and "too late to have a say" are different questions, and people blur them. The r/opensource fight, the GCC policy, the Codeberg vote and the data center polling are all people setting terms of use. Some of that is clumsy. It's still how the terms get set, and nobody votes on a technology once it's fully absorbed. We aren't there.
So, a future without AI?
Not one where it never existed. There's a future where it's a tool you pick up on purpose and one where it's the water you swim in, and the gap between them is mostly defaults. The AI-free future people imagine reminds me of life before smartphones. You can live there. You'll just pay for it every time you need to buy a parking ticket.
I'd rather decide what I want to be true about my work, then work out where AI fits around that.
How I use it
Since I'm telling you what to worry about, you should know where I stand. I use AI every day. Here's what for.
Images. The watercolor headers on this site start as prompts. I'm not an illustrator, and I'd rather have a hand-painted-looking header than a stock photo of a laptop. I write the prompt, I pick the result, and I throw out a lot of them (like a lot, a lot!). The idea is mine. The brushwork isn't.
Catching mistakes. It's a second pair of eyes that doesn't get tired. Typos, a broken link, a build error I've stared at too long, a sentence that says the opposite of what I meant. It finds things I've gone blind to. It also flags things that aren't mistakes, so I still have to decide.
Filling skill gaps. There are parts of this job where I'm weak, and I'd rather be honest about that than fake it. AI gets me from "I have no idea where to start" to "I can see the shape of this." Then I go read the real documentation, because the shape is only a starting point.
Enhancing, not replacing. This is the rule I keep coming back to. If I'm using it to do something I already know how to do, it's a faster pair of hands. If I'm using it for something I don't know, it's a tutor, and I owe myself the follow-up. The line I try not to cross is handing over the thinking. When I notice I'm accepting output I couldn't defend in a code review, I stop and slow down.
None of that makes me neutral. I've benefited from this technology, which makes it easy to wave off the people who are hurting because of it.
Staying human
"Human" is a slippery word, so here's what I mean by it. When a machine can produce the output, what's left is judgment and each other. These are the habits I try to keep around those. I break every one of them, regularly. The only skill involved is noticing when I have.
I try to form an opinion before I ask. Any opinion. Even a wrong guess gives me something to push against, and without one I'm just picking between answers somebody else wrote. I slip most when I'm tired, which is exactly when the habit matters.
I try to ship only what I could explain to a skeptical colleague. OpenJDK and LLVM disagree on plenty, but both land here: a person answers for the change. I fail at this one quietly, because output that looks finished feels finished. Reading it again, slowly, is the entire fix, and I still skip it more than I'd like.
I keep a few things slow on purpose. Pick something where the effort is the value, and protect it from your own optimizing. Nobody's grading it and there's nothing to hand off, which is the point.
Then there's the one that matters most. Spend real time with real people. Family, friends, whoever will sit in a room with you and not need anything improved. AI can draft the message, summarize the thread, even keep you company at 2 a.m. It can't show up. Everything else here protects your own head. This one protects the people in your life, and if the future gets very efficient and very lonely, I've lost, no matter what I shipped.
What I'd actually worry about
Not robots. These, roughly in order:
- The first rung disappearing, and the senior shortage five years out that follows.
- Maintainers and moderators burning out under volume they never signed up for.
- Products that imitate care for people who can't tell the difference.
- Power, water and money costs landing on people who never chose any of this.
None of that needs a superintelligence. They're ordinary problems with ordinary causes, which is the good news, because ordinary problems can be argued over, regulated and fixed.
I'm not going to ban AI from my own work, and I won't pretend the people who want to are being silly. The r/opensource mods got the rule wrong and the worry right.
Where's your line? I'd like to hear it.
