Someone asks you a question. You don’t know the answer off the top of your head, so you paste it into Claude, copy the response, and send it back. That’s not a human interaction. That’s a very slow API call with extra steps. I keep seeing this pattern, at work, on forums, in social communities, and it makes me wonder if we’ve completely missed the point. Not of AI. Of ourselves.

It’s 5 PM on a Thursday. Something broke mid-morning and your team has been grinding on it for hours. Good engineers, working hard, coming up empty because the system is poorly documented and the people who built it have either moved on or moved teams. You’ve burned most of the day and you’re no closer to resolution. So you escalate. You ping the leads. You ask in the channel where someone, surely, knows this service well enough to point you in the right direction.

The blood on my hands didn’t register as blood at first. I’d thrown my mask off after the shot. Reflex. Pain management. Give the jaw some air. The pain was sharp and then immediately dull, the kind that makes you think stinger before it makes you think anything else. So I knelt on the ice, head down, eyes on the white below me, and stayed there. A couple of guys skated over.

Easy save. I could smother it, kill the play. Instead I kick it out to their other forward. Not a mistake. A choice. I’m bored and my team’s up four goals and I want to make another save. So I manufacture chaos, create my own work, turn an easy night into something that feels like hockey. That’s the first thirty-six minutes. The second half, I’m making four saves in a row and watching the fifth one trickle past my pad anyway.

I was standing outside a conference room watching my team lie to another team about a database outage. It was day four. Through the glass door, I could see the engineer on the call, explaining with impressive confidence that our cloud provider was having issues. Any minute now, they said, the vendor would resolve it and services would come back up. I pulled up the provider’s status page. Green across the board.