The thing I have always seemed to struggle to reconcile about AI use and the massive indie backlash against it, my own personal frustrations stemming from art and culture and humanity included in that backlash, is the arms race aspect.

The technical bar is raised whether one participates or not.

It’s all well and good to wag a moralizing finger at anyone uses AI for practical purposes, painting the whole system with a broad brush, but arms races tend to be existential.  Those who don’t ramp up proportionally to their competitors face the prospect of being wiped out for it.

Take vibe coding as an example.

I write code. I have written code for over forty years. I write C++, Java, Rust, Perl, Python and of course BASIC. I also am well versed in all kinds of scripting languages that help me professionally build web sites and platforms. 

But I’m one guy.

I have worked for decades to understand security and stability, best practices and code hygiene. And when my biggest threat to hacking against the system I built was other humans then a mix of obscurity and “good enough” security has served me solid.

But then AI arrived. The arms race cranked up a couple of notches and continues to accelerate.

This leaves people like me— people who (a) rely on secure, reliable code to do our professional work but (b) are wary of AI for a hundred different reasons—with a pretty binary choice: join the race or dibs out.

Suddenly doing a vibe-run security analysis of code I’m using in live, production projects seems like an existential necessity and not merely a dabbling in AI for giggles. And if using commodity AI to get that work done is the only option in my budget, the moral struggle wedges right in there, too.

It becomes a question of if everyone else is using it—my competitors, my counterparts, and my crackers—there is no logical option but to use it myself. Right?

Millions of small businesses just like me are going face the exact same dilemma: use the tool or fall so far behind that all you’ll have left are the warm fuzzy feelings that you didn’t join the race at all.