Stop apologising for using AI

How long do you think it'll be until we stop saying "with 's help" or "I wrote this with " as if it's a bad thing? Let's admit it, if you aren't using AI in some way in your job, you're one of the very few.

Take my recent code contributions to H5YR.com. Every single one of them is coauthored by me and Claude. Is that something I should be hiding? Or apologising for?

I feel like we, as developers, are almost guilty that we're no longer handwriting code, so we have to caveat everything with "well, I say I wrote it, but actually AI did".

Did I ever really write it?

Even in my time in this industry, things have moved along pretty quickly. The first program I wrote was in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum. It printed a hello world message to the screen. Simple, but I wrote it. Or did I? I copied it from a book. So does that count as me writing it?

I then moved on from my trusty ZX Spectrum and got a PC. Now I was running MS-DOS, writing .bat files and, again, learning from magazines and books. No internet was available to me back then. Wow, I'm old.

Then I got a PC that ran Windows 95 and all of a sudden a world of colour appeared before my eyes. Instead of using the command line, I had a GUI and I could code in Notepad! This was a massive step forward for me and it's when my interest in coding really started to grow.

I went from Notepad to Dreamweaver, then from Dreamweaver back to Notepad because I didn't like not having control. I then started coding at school, where I was introduced to Visual Basic (and I still hacked around in the actual files in Notepad when I couldn't get the GUI to do what I wanted!).

Can you see where I'm going with this? Then we got Visual Studio with IntelliSense and autocomplete, another step forward in making a developer's life easier.

And let's not forget Stack Overflow. How many of us have copied an answer straight from there into our code? Plenty. But I don't remember anyone writing "I wrote this with Stack Overflow's help" in their commit messages.

AI is just the next step

I see AI as the next step forward, but this time it hasn't taken years for people to adopt it. It's happened, what feels like, overnight. I think this is why people feel guilty or apologetic about it.

What we should be apologetic about is using it as an excuse for bad code.

"Oh, I didn't write that, Claude did." Nope, sorry, you prompted it. You brought it into this world, so you own it now. It's still your code. You should understand it and you should know why it's doing what it's doing.

With great power

The models available to us now are super powerful, but we control that power. "With great power comes great responsibility." We owe it to ourselves, and our future selves, to still be proud of the code we create.

Today's models learned from the code we all put out into the world, and tomorrow's will too. If the internet fills up with sloppy AI code that nobody checked, guess what the next models learn from? But if we publish code that AI helped write and we've actually reviewed and refined, the next lot of tools get better. That's on us.

So what does owning it actually look like?

• Read your own PR before anyone else reviews it. If you haven't read it, why should they?
• Be able to explain your own code. If someone asks why it works the way it does, "Claude did it" isn't an answer.
• Make sure your tests are actually useful. If you use tests, check they're testing something meaningful and not just passing for the sake of it. Better yet, write the tests yourself.

Own your code

So, all I ask of you as a developer in 2026 is this. Own your code. Don't use Claude as an excuse. Stop even saying "Oh, I made this with Claude / Copilot / whatever you use". We all know you have. So let's just get back to building the stuff we only dreamt of in the past, and embrace the change.

A small confession

Yes, I see the irony. I've just spent a whole post telling you to stop saying it, so here goes. I wrote this post myself, then I asked Claude to read it, fix my grammar and help me improve it. It found more than I'd like to admit. But it's still my post, and I'm owning it.