Rich Hickey

Rich Hickey is the American programmer who created Clojure in 2007 — a modern Lisp on the JVM whose design talks (“Simple Made Easy,” “Hammock Driven Development”) are among the most-watched and most-quoted in software engineering. He co-founded Datomic, served as CTO of Cognitect through its acquisition by Nubank, and remains Clojure’s benevolent dictator; few living designers command more reverence among working programmers.

“Thanks AI!”

In late December 2025, after receiving an AI-generated fan email — “sycophantic blather worthy of a third grader’s homework assignment,” signed by the model that wrote it — Hickey published “Thanks AI!”, a mock letter of gratitude to AI purveyors that became an instant flashpoint on Hacker News. The essay is a cascade of sarcastic thank-yous: for “destroying education,” for “raising utility rates and killing the environment,” for “replacing search results with summary BS,” for “replacing musical expression with the sounds of robot parrots chirping,” and for “running the second biggest and most damaging con of this century.”

The developer-specific charge cuts deepest coming from him: that time spent “trying to coax some useful output” from “BS generators” would be better spent teaching interns and entry-level developers, “who, being actually intelligent, could learn from what they are told, and maintain what they make.” It is the apprenticeship argument — AI severs the pipeline through which programmers have always been made — from a man whose whole philosophy holds that the hard part of software is thinking, not typing.

The essay drew comparison to a similar anti-AI broadside from Go co-creator Rob Pike posted days earlier, and placed Hickey firmly in the camp of language creators — with Bjarne Stroustrup and Andrew Kelley — publicly resisting the AI-coding wave that peers like Linus Torvalds have embraced.