Dear founder,
AI was supposed to do our chores while we write prose and compose symphonies. Why is it composing our music and writing our books now, while WE do the chores?
As software founders, we have a special responsibility — after all, we're the ones crafting a new reality of AI empowerment. But here's the thing: an AI does not love its work. It can't.
And that's a problem. Today, I'll dive into how we can solve this.
Oh, and before you get into it: Podscan is running a 30%-off Black Friday Deal — use "BLACKFRIDAY" during checkout for a full year of discount on any plan.
🎧 Listen to this on my podcast.
I recently came across a poem by Joseph Fasano titled "To a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper." And I want to share this short poem with you right now. Here it goes:
Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying
to be free of?
The living? The miraculous
task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.
Its final line struck me deeply: "love is for the ones who loved the work." When I copied the poem into my notes, Notion immediately asked if I wanted to "improve" the writing—an AI feature that felt almost comically ironic. This poem, with its powerful message and lyrical tone, needed no improvement. It captured perfectly the emotional state I've been grappling with as an entrepreneur in tech.
As I sat coding today, I hit a familiar wall. The feature I was building wasn't working quite right, and I found myself behaving super strangely. Instead of engaging my developer mind—stepping back and solving the problem manually as I've done countless times before—I caught myself desperately tweaking prompts, asking the AI to try again, to give me the full code in different segments and variations. All to avoid writing twenty simple lines of code that I could have easily written myself.
That moment made me pause. Had I become so dependent on AI tools that I was actively avoiding the work I've done and loved for decades? It was quite a sobering realization that led me to reflect on my relationship with coding. Every line of code I've written over the past twenty years, good or bad (and let's be honest, most of it probably bad), has filled me with a certain pride. Not immediate pride, mind you, but a slow-building accumulation of joy and love for the craft.
The code I write today is built on the foundation of trying to figure things out for two decades. It's constructed from thousands of lines of past code, from the experience of learning to do it right, from failing repeatedly and getting incrementally better each time. That journey of becoming a little more optimal, a little more performant with every iteration—that's where the love lives.
Love for the craft. Love for having developed and honed a skill.
We're in a fascinating phase right now, particularly as technologists and entrepreneurs. We're using AI tools to eliminate the very jobs that allow us to express ourselves. And while coding might seem different—after all, it's just writing instructions, right?—I'm starting to see parallels in how AI affects our relationship with the work.
At Podscan.fm, we use AI extensively. Beyond the conscious interactions —think customer service automations, for example —, there's automated backend work happening constantly—transcription, entity recognition, inference, sentiment detection. But there's a crucial difference between automation that handles tedious tasks and AI that replaces creative work. I want AI to sift through documents, find patterns, summarize information—tasks that don't necessarily need a human component. But I don't want it to replace the spark of creation, the human-to-human interaction that gives our work meaning.
When you delegate work to another person, there's a relationship of trust, empowerment, and collaboration. But with AI, you're delegating to an ephemeral entity that exists for milliseconds. The text sent to the GPU, processed by the large language model, creates a response and vanishes.
There can be no relationship, no trust, no connection, no excitement in this exchange. It's merely a tool, like a hammer or a blender—an externalization of self rather than a true collaborator. A hammer is is an extension of your arm. That's all it ever will be. A blender is a stringer set of teeth. For that matter, a computer is an externalized brain — but still a tool.
This reminds me of Immanuel Kant's lesser-known categorical imperative: that we should treat others not just as means to an end, but as ends in themselves. Every human interaction should be mutually beneficial. But with AI, no matter how many times you say "thank you" in a chat prompt, there's no real relationship. You're interacting with a blink of consciousness that disappears forever after each response.
As I integrate AI more deeply into my daily work, I'm realizing we need to develop a crucial skill as a society, particularly in our community of entrepreneurs: understanding which tasks are worth delegating to these systems. Creative tasks that build relationships and express our humanity? Those should stay with us. I barely want another person handling my customer interactions or social media presence—why would I want AI doing it? A thing without a heart?
The poem that sparked these thoughts could technically have been written by AI. But it wasn't. It was written by a person who became proud enough and joyful enough with their work to publish it, to contribute something meaningful that we can trace back to them, engage with, and learn from.
Love is indeed for those who love the work. And to love the work means to do it, to learn it, to fail at it, and yes, sometimes to seek assistance, maybe from an AI. But having work done by something that doesn't—can't—love the work will never create something truly lovable or worthy of pride. As we rush to embrace AI's capabilities, perhaps we should pause to consider what we might be giving up in return.
There are so many inventions that take the generative capacity of AI to the extreme. Podcasts narrated by AI hosts, faking a real conversation about topics sourced and summarized by an AI resource agent. As much as they want it to sound human, there's no heart in that.
And sometimes, the heartlessness stares us in the face. Just google Apple AI summary fails, and you'll find the weirdest summaries that a human would never have written. The one I love the most is when some guy's mom sent a message like "This hike almost killed me", which the Apple AI summarizes into "attempted suicide, but recovered and hiked in Palm Springs" — it's as bizarre as it is hollow and without anything resembling humanity.
As tech founders, we're responsible for this kind of stuff.
So, think about this poem when you find a moment.
What are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.
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