I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human
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What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
Wendy Liu — a software developer turned tech critic and author of Abolish Silicon Valley — argues that she deliberately avoids AI tools in her coding and writing practice. Drawing on her own experience learning to code in the mid-2000s and developing a voice as a writer critical of Silicon Valley, Liu frames cognitive offloading as a genuine threat: surrendering thinking to AI doesn’t just make us less skilled, it makes us less human.
Liu situates her personal resistance within a broader political critique. She warns that as big tech companies like OpenAI and Anthropic move to privatise intelligence itself — treating it as a utility — individuals risk surrendering their cognitive sovereignty. In a world gripped by an AI bubble, she argues that inefficiency and inconvenience may be the necessary price of preserving integrity, character, and one’s relationship with the world.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Thinking is the Point
Liu argues that cognitive struggle — in coding, writing, and reasoning — is not a bug to be eliminated but the very source of human growth.
Writing Reveals Your Values
The writing process is transformational — it helps you discover what you believe and builds the conviction to defend those beliefs.
AI Deskills Entire Fields
“Vibe-coding” and AI writing tools have hollowed out software development and flooded the internet with low-quality AI-generated content called “slop.”
Intelligence is Being Privatised
Big tech’s goal of making intelligence a “utility” is effectively a corporate takeover of thought — a threat Liu calls the loss of cognitive sovereignty.
Young People Are at Risk
Liu worries that the AI boom teaches younger generations to see technology as an opaque black box — something that happens to them, not something they can understand or change.
Inefficiency Preserves Humanity
Liu accepts being a less efficient coder and writer, framing this trade-off as the conscious cost of living with intention, integrity, and genuine human character.
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Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Resisting AI Is an Act of Self-Preservation
Liu’s central argument is that deliberately avoiding AI tools — in coding, writing, and daily thinking — is not a nostalgic quirk but a principled stand. In an era when corporations are actively monetising human cognition, choosing to think for yourself is both a personal and political act. The difficulty of thinking is not a problem to be solved; it is the source of growth, identity, and integrity.
Purpose
To Persuade Readers to Reclaim Their Cognitive Agency
Liu writes to challenge the normalisation of AI dependency. Through personal memoir and cultural critique, she aims to make readers question their own relationship with AI tools — not just as a matter of personal habit, but as a political stance against the consolidation of intelligence by a handful of powerful corporations. She models the position she advocates: this essay itself is the proof.
Structure
Personal Memoir → Cultural Critique → Political Manifesto
The essay opens with an autobiographical account of learning to code and write, building credibility through lived experience. It then widens into a critique of how AI has deskilled both fields. The final third pivots to explicit political argument — framing AI resistance as an act of cognitive sovereignty — before closing with a personal declaration of values and acceptance of trade-offs.
Tone
Reflective, Defiant & Morally Earnest
Liu writes with quiet conviction rather than outrage. The tone is introspective and personal — she acknowledges her own inefficiency without embarrassment — but it hardens into defiance when she addresses corporate power. There is a thread of moral seriousness throughout: this is a writer who believes that how you spend your attention is an ethical question, and she asks the reader to take it seriously too.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
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Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
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Too willing to believe things without sufficient evidence or critical scrutiny; naively trusting.
“…some gap between my own increasingly critical understanding of Silicon Valley and the optimistic and credulous way it was discussed by other people.”
Understood by only a few; requiring specialised knowledge to comprehend — often used of technical or esoteric subjects.
“The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over arcane documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted.”
Understood or comprehended fully, especially something complex or mysterious; to have grasped the depth of something.
“…something foisted upon them, managed by opaque corporations over which they have no control… whose inner workings cannot be fathomed, much less changed.”
Thin, clinging extensions — literally a plant’s; figuratively, the creeping, pervasive influence of an organisation spreading into many areas of life.
“…AI companies raising unprecedented amounts of money with the goal of inserting their tendrils into every facet of society.”
Primarily motivated by financial gain rather than principles or values; willing to act without ethical consideration in exchange for money.
“…a more mercenary version of me could be raking it in at an AI startup right now.”
Forced upon someone without their consent or genuine choice; imposed on a person by an outside power they cannot easily resist or refuse.
“…technology as a black box, something foisted upon them, managed by opaque corporations over which they have no control.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1Wendy Liu argues that she used to avoid new technology even before the rise of AI, making her a consistently cautious adopter of digital tools.
2According to Liu, what is the primary reason she avoids using AI tools?
3Which sentence best captures Liu’s argument that the writing process has intrinsic value beyond its final output?
4Evaluate the following statements about Liu’s claims in the article.
Liu acknowledges that avoiding AI tools makes her a less efficient coder and writer.
Liu argues that research on AI’s impact on cognition is still inconclusive and cannot yet be relied upon.
Liu frames her refusal to use AI as both a personal act of self-preservation and a political response to corporate power.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5What can be most reasonably inferred about Liu’s view of young people growing up during the AI boom?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Cognitive offloading refers to delegating mental tasks — reasoning, writing, problem-solving — to an external tool rather than doing them yourself. Liu sees this as dangerous because thinking is not just a means to an end; it is how we develop values, build character, and stay rooted in the world. Surrendering it to AI tools atrophies exactly the capacities that make us distinctly human.
Vibe-coding is the practice of generating software by prompting AI tools using everyday conversational language, without needing to understand the underlying code. For Liu, it epitomises deskilling — it allows anyone to produce apps without mastering a craft, which she sees as part of a broader erosion of technical competence and intellectual engagement in the software development field.
Liu uses the word “heretical” because we are in the middle of an AI boom — a moment of near-universal corporate, cultural, and financial enthusiasm for AI tools. To refuse engagement with them is to resist what feels like an overwhelming consensus. She compares the power behind AI to a “divine authority,” making her dissent feel not just unusual but almost taboo, even as she maintains it is the right position to hold.
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This article is rated Intermediate. Liu writes in accessible, personal prose, but the piece requires readers to follow a layered argument that moves between personal memoir, cultural critique, and political philosophy. Terms like “cognitive offloading,” “cognitive sovereignty,” and “LLM technology” assume some familiarity with the tech industry, and the essay’s persuasive logic requires careful inference rather than simple fact retrieval.
Wendy Liu is a San Francisco-based writer and the author of Abolish Silicon Valley, a book that offers a critical insider perspective on the tech industry. Her significance here is that she is not an AI sceptic from the outside — she is a trained software developer who built websites as a child and worked in the industry. Her critique of AI carries weight precisely because it comes from someone who understands the technology and has chosen, deliberately, to resist it.
The Ultimate Reading Course covers 9 RC question types: Multiple Choice, True/False, Multi-Statement T/F, Text Highlight, Fill in the Blanks, Matching, Sequencing, Error Spotting, and Short Answer. This comprehensive coverage prepares you for any reading comprehension format you might encounter.
