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I Will Never Use AI to Code (Manning-Franklin)

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title
I Will Never Use AI to Code (Manning-Franklin)
type
summary
summary
Anthony Manning-Franklin's nine-reason refusal, stitching personal-craft, skill-decay, economic, and ethical arguments into one declaration
tags
ai-bubble, llm-skepticism, craft
sources
i-will-never-use-ai-to-code
created
2026-05-10
updated
2026-05-10

Anthony Manning-Franklin's March 2026 essay on antman-does-software.com. The title is the position; the essay is nine reasons stitched together. Unlike i-am-an-ai-hater, it isn't a refusal-of-discourse piece — it's a personal-discipline post that happens to gather most of the anti-llm-discourse cluster's arguments under one roof.

The structure is its argument. By piling craft, learning, atrophy, economics, accountability, environment, and team dynamics into one declaration, Manning-Franklin treats them as mutually reinforcing rather than independently sufficient. Each one alone would be a reasonable hesitation; together they justify a categorical "never."

The nine reasons, briefly

  1. Personal enjoyment. Coding is a craft he likes. The thing being optimized away is the part that made the work worth doing. Same shape as his father's view of writing.
  2. Skill development. Recognition (passive reading) ≠ skill (active practice, mistakes, integration). AI can create an "illusion of learning" — you saw the answer without earning the model.
  3. Skill decay. Outsourcing creates a feedback loop: skills atrophy, the temptation to outsource grows, dependency accelerates. This is the personal version of skill-atrophy-supervision-paradox — Manning-Franklin frames it as ratchet, not just supervision risk.
  4. Unsustainable economics. ~$1T raised in debt against ~$37B revenue with zero profit. Use of AI is participation in a subsidy game that will reverse. Same numbers Zitron tracks in subprime-ai-crisis and the warning signs in ai-bubble-pale-horses.
  5. Accountability void. Output you can't reliably assess can't be cleanly owned. Critical for safety-critical systems.
  6. Environmental impact. ~10 GW of data-center power, fossil-fuel-heavy, on productive farmland.
  7. Economic irrationality. If AI cuts headcount across industries, who buys the consumer products? An "extracting all wealth" failure mode.
  8. Team dynamics / institutional knowledge. Code is liability; understanding built between people is asset. AI can't generate the shared knowledge.
  9. (ninth point in the essay; the WebFetch summary collapsed the count — verify against the original at antman-does-software.com)

Where this fits in the cluster

This piece sits inside anti-llm-discourse but unusually it spans four of the five sub-genres. Reasons 1-3 are the engineering / craft case (cf. no-silver-bullet-llms, peril-of-laziness-lost, cult-of-vibe-coding). Reasons 4, 6 are the economic / financial case. Reason 5, 8 are the institutional-shape case. Reason 7 is sociological / political. The only sub-genre Manning-Franklin doesn't occupy is rhetorical refusal — he keeps the polite-discourse frame Moser walks out of.

The skill-decay framing in reason 3 is worth pulling out separately. skill-atrophy-supervision-paradox (Lars Faye) treats atrophy as the thing that breaks the supervisor role. Manning-Franklin extends it: even without a supervisor task, the user's own coding skill drops with use, and the drop incentivizes more use. The ratchet is internal, not relational. Same direction as peril-of-laziness-lost (Cantrill on the missing virtue) but framed at the individual level.

The economic claim ($1T debt, $37B revenue, zero profit) appears across the cluster but Manning-Franklin uses it as a personal reason — by using AI you're underwriting the bubble. That moves the argument from "the economics will collapse" (Zitron) to "your daily use is the funding mechanism."

What's load-bearing

The bundling. None of the nine reasons is original to Manning-Franklin. The artifact is the willingness to stack them and refuse to argue any one of them alone. Same structural move as i-am-an-ai-hater — refusing to debate one objection at a time — but staying inside the argumentative frame.

Whether it travels: less rhetorically polished than Moser's, but probably more useful for someone trying to articulate their own decision. The list-shape is reusable; the refusal-shape isn't.

Sources

Linked from