Interface IS Cognition: Why the Same AI Tool Creates and Destroys

James Randall has been writing code since he was seven. Fifty years old now, seasoned enough to have outlived several paradigm shifts. When he wrote about AI, the word he reached for wasn't "disruption" or "opportunity." It was hollowed. "The path from intention to result was direct, visible, and mine," he wrote. After AI entered his workflow: "reviewing, directing, correcting — it doesn't feel the same." He called it a fallow period — not burnout, something stranger. The thing he loved hadn't been taken away. It had been rearranged. On the same Hacker News thread, a different story. Alex Garden — founder of Relic Entertainment, the studio behind Homeworld — described the opposite experience. At 2AM, coding with AI, he felt the old enchantment return. The excitement of building, amplified. The same technology. Radically opposite emotional responses. The easy explanation is personality. Randall resists change; Garden embraces it. But that's lazy, and wrong. Randall isn't a Luddite — he'