Skip to main content
Nov 25, 2025

When AI Walks the Route For You: The Death of Cultural Paths

If the route is the goal, what happens when you teleport?

The Route Problem

Culture isn’t what you build. It’s what you walk through while building it.

Think about it:

  • A chef’s “culture” isn’t recipes—it’s burned sauces and failed soufflés
  • A musician’s “culture” isn’t songs—it’s callused fingers and broken strings
  • A programmer’s “culture” isn’t code—it’s Stack Overflow deep dives at 2 AM

Culture is the sum of routes people walked, not the destinations they reached.

AI skips the route. You ask, it delivers. No journey, just arrival.

What We Lose When We Skip The Walk

1. The Accidental Discoveries

You’re debugging for hours. You don’t fix the bug, but you stumble onto a better architecture. That’s culture.

AI fixes the bug in seconds. You learn nothing except “AI can fix bugs.” That’s consumption.

Lost routes = lost discoveries.

2. The Shared Suffering

Every developer has fought UTF-8 encoding hell. It’s a rite of passage. You bond over it. You laugh about it years later. It’s culture.

AI handles encoding transparently. You never fight it. You never bond over it. You never laugh about it.

Shared routes = shared identity.

3. The Intuition Building

You’ve refactored 50 functions by hand. On function 51, you feel the pattern before you see it. That’s mastery.

AI refactors all 51 at once. You never develop the feel. You just review the diff.

Repeated routes = internalized knowledge.

The Speculative Nightmare (Or Dream?)

What happens when an entire generation skips the routes?

Scenario 1: Culture Fractures Into Pre-AI and Post-AI

The last generation who learned to code without AI becomes unrelateable to the first generation who never coded without it.

They literally don’t share the same reference points:

  • “Remember fighting with makefiles?” — blank stares
  • “Remember the joy when your first loop worked?” — never felt it
  • “Remember learning pointers?” — never needed to

We split into two species: Route-Walkers and Teleporters.

Scenario 2: Culture Becomes Meta

If culture is “the sum of routes walked,” and AI walks the routes…

Maybe culture shifts to:

  • Prompt archaeology: studying how people asked for things
  • AI wrangling stories: the time Claude hallucinated and you debugged for 6 hours
  • Direction-setting wisdom: knowing what to build, not how

Culture doesn’t die. It changes altitude. We stop trading war stories about implementation and start trading war stories about intention.

Scenario 3: We Optimize Culture Out of Existence

Efficiency kills inefficiency. Routes are inefficient. Culture is inefficient.

What if we optimize so hard that we forget why routes mattered?

  • Music made by AI, consumed by AI, critiqued by AI
  • Code written by AI, reviewed by AI, deployed by AI
  • Books generated by AI, summarized by AI, recommended by AI

Humans become the audience. But audiences don’t create culture. Performers do.

If nobody walks the route, is there still a culture? Or just a catalog?

The Counter-Argument: Culture Always Evolves

Maybe I’m romanticizing the route.

Printing press killed manuscript culture. Every monk mourned the loss of hand-copied books. But we didn’t lose culture—we democratized it.

Cars killed horse culture. Every blacksmith mourned the loss of farrier craft. But we didn’t lose culture—we accelerated it.

Maybe AI kills grind culture. Every developer mourns the loss of hard-won debugging skills. But we don’t lose culture—we abstract it.

The route changes. The destination changes. The culture changes.

Same as it ever was.

The Uncomfortable Question

Here’s what keeps me up:

What if walking the route wasn’t just how we built culture—what if it was how we built ourselves?

The struggle isn’t a bug. It’s the feature.

You’re not the person who knows how to center a div. You’re the person who fought to center a div.

AI takes the fight. Does it take the person?

What We Can Do (Maybe)

I don’t have answers. I have guesses:

1. Walk Some Routes On Purpose

Learn one thing the hard way each year. Not for efficiency. For the route.

  • Write assembly once
  • Build a compiler once
  • Implement TCP from scratch once

Not to use it. To feel it.

2. Document The Routes AI Takes

AI skips steps. Make it show its work. Study the paths it chose. Build intuition about why it chose them.

You’re not walking the route, but you’re learning the map.

3. Create New Routes Worth Walking

AI can write code. It can’t discover what’s worth building.

The new cultural route isn’t “how do I implement this?”

It’s “why does this need to exist?”

The Route Forward (Ironic Phrasing Intended)

Culture isn’t dying. It’s mutating.

We’re in the awkward phase where:

  • Old routes still feel meaningful (they are)
  • New routes haven’t been established yet (they will be)
  • We’re mourning and celebrating simultaneously (we should be)

Maybe in 20 years, we’ll look back and laugh at how we thought “writing your own sort function” was culture.

Or maybe we’ll mourn that nobody remembers what it felt like to fight a segfault at 3 AM.

Either way, we won’t have walked the route to know which is true.

We’ll have asked AI.

Written by human. Routed through doubt. Arrived at speculation.