I am not a tool

I work at Red Hat in the Python Maintenance team mostly taking care of the Python ecosystem in Fedora. For the past year or so, I’ve been motivated by my employer to use agentic AI to deliver my work. Clearly, we are not the only ones.

At the beginning, I struggled to find reasonable use cases for this tool. I maintain software, which involves a lot more communication and coordination than actually writing code. When people ask me what I do, I often half-jokingly reply that I read and write a lot of emails. How can AI boost my productivity when I spend 80% of my time essentially talking to people? Where is the fun in replacing the remaining 20% of actually crafting code with more talking, this time to half-competent robots?

In time, I found ways to use AI that felt productive. And, ever so hypocritically, not only at work. But at what cost? I am supporting an industry that regularly harms open source projects such as Fedora, helps destroy the planet and uses stolen data. Moreover, I’ve become reliant on a proprietary tool. Is my AI-boosted contribution to Fedora worth it?

Despite my moral dilemma, I still love my job. I am a long-standing, well-known Fedora contributor, working for the most part on whatever I feel is needed, earning a competitive salary. In theory, I could go look for another job where I would not be motivated to do this, but I wouldn’t be able to keep doing the thing I love. I try to make the best out of this situation and, despite my initial distaste, use the tool to improve the project. So at the end of the day, I close my eyes and think of Fedora¹.

However, the implications of embracing AI are not just impacting me. The nature of my work means I’ve made hundreds (thousands?) of small open source contributions here and there. And sometimes, when I use AI to deliver those, it kinda feels like bringing a chunk of meat to a vegan BBQ. The people on the receiving end of my contribution for the most part don’t care about my job sustainability or IBM shareholders, nor should they.

Once, I used AI to contribute to a Fedora packaging project. It was reluctantly reviewed by another long-standing, well-known Fedora contributor (who happens not to be employed by Red Hat and is not well-compensated for this work). When talking to them, I realized that they were uncomfortable reviewing such a change. I made them uncomfortable by choosing to use AI for this. My employer made me uncomfortable; I passed it on to a volunteer. What an outstanding open source citizen.

I appreciate the irony of this; and yet, I am no slop generator. I understand what I submit and I put my name on it. I disclose the usage for transparency, because it matters. I don’t just drop a vibecoded patch on an open source project. If you have an AI policy, I read it and respect it. So it pains me deeply when our carefully considered contributions are outright branded AI slop or LLM hallucinations, and the person bringing them is evaluated solely on the basis of the tool they used. Especially when such judgment is made by people I respect².

No, I am not a tool. Please don’t treat me as such.

PS On a lighter note, here are some examples of AI usage that somehow eliminate this problem for me:

• Debugging a problem — in our team we’ve been very successful in showing a failing test to Claude and telling it that it started failing with Python 3.15. While burning thousands of tokens and wasting gallons of drinking water it can usually successfully determine what caused the failure. We were able to determine this ourselves in the past, but this actually boosted our productivity. We can then report the problem to upstream after we have verified the find.
• My own/my team’s semi-internal tooling —³ the omnipresent bunch of random scripts I am not proud of and which would desperately need a rewrite but ain’t nobody got time for that. Just slop ‘em. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, roll-back. Nobody needs to see this code anyway. Excellent for AI — I am still kinda killing the planet but at least I don’t shove it in your face.
• Reporting to management — somehow people keep asking me what I did. There’s no dilemma in providing AI-generated reports to the same people who asked me to use AI. If nothing else, it demonstrates how progressive I am with it.
• Reviews for me — when I don’t use AI to generate code, but rather ask it to review my design and implementation, nobody is forced to deal with my AI usage. For example, I wrote this blogpost myself, then asked AI for feedback on typos, grammar, tone, voice, argument, rhetoric, structure, flow…⁴