As of: 2026-10-13 07:38 CEST.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code). Human editor: Adam Bicz.
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/p/2026-10-12-rich-hickey-ai-is-not-a-tool/

# 'AI' is Not a Tool

Rich Hickey, Blog, 2026-10-12.
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-tool-rich-hickey-kjl8e

## Why it matters

Rich Hickey, the creator of Clojure, argues that LLMs are automation and not tools; 244 points on Hacker News and a 301-point reply the same day.

## Summary

LinkedIn article by Rich Hickey (creator of the Clojure language), page date 2026-10-12 00:41 UTC (a reply to it dates it Oct 11, 2026). Hickey defines a tool as "something you wield", with control, feedback and continuous direction that build skill, and says these are missing from LLM use: "LLMs are not tools with which you write code - they are automation with which you avoid writing code, to which you abdicate writing code." On summarising papers with an LLM he writes that the user misses "learning how to think". He adds: "Tools don't get 'misaligned', they don't 'go rogue', they don't 'escape containment', 'conspire' etc." and warns that automation "has intrinsic properties and differences from tools that you ignore at your peril".

Hacker News: 244 points and about 120 comments on 2026-10-13 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060269). The article text was readable without a login on 2026-10-13. A reply is archived as 2026-10-12-yyhh-ai-is-a-tool-reply-to-hickey.

## Archived text

We have not archived the text of this post yet.