simon_willison ยท May 30, 2026 ยท news
I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline
I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline I've seen a lot of posts on forums from people threatening to quit their careers over AI. This is not one of those: Chad Whitacre is taking concrete steps, starting with this typewritten, scanned letter I'm retiring from tech. Well, "retiring" is euphemistic. I'm stepping away from tech, and that includes Open Source. [...] AI was the last straw. Have you heard of that island off India where the indigenous population kills any outsiders fool-hardy enough to land? They are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday, or at the very least should not want to see completely extinguished. A reminder. Never forget your roots. Here in Pennsylvania we have the Amish performing a similar function. Significantly less hostile, though still set apart, they bear witness to what was normal for all of us a couple short centuries ago: horse and buggy, wood stoves and lanterns. My intent is to be AI Amish, which means Internet Amish. Not 1780, but 1980. Neo-Amish. I'm fine driving a car and flipping a lightswitch, by which I mean that they don't make me into something I hate, which AI and [struck through: social media] [handwritten above: doomscrolling] do. I'll admit that at first I wasn't entirely sure if this was serious. Then I found this earlier post by Chad from Feb 19 2026, Spitting Out the Agentic Kool-Aid : I figured Iโd better taste the Kool-Aid in order to form an opinion, so I dove into Claude Code with