Rich Hickey's 'AI Is Not a Tool' Draws a Same-Day Reply Arguing His Own Definition Allows It

Rich Hickey wrote on October 12 that large language models are automation rather than tools, and a rebuttal posted the same day argues that his own definition of a tool lets a person wield one.

Hickey's essay, titled "'AI' is Not a Tool," appeared on LinkedIn and was mirrored as a GitHub gist. InfoQ introduced him in a 2012 interview as the author of Clojure and designer of Datomic. The Hacker News thread on the essay stood at 303 points and 180 comments on Wednesday.

What Hickey's essay claims

Hickey starts from the dictionary. He quotes one definition of a tool as "a device or implement, especially one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function," and defines automation as "working by itself with little or no direct human control." His own preference is that a tool is something you wield, meaning you hold it, feel its feedback and command its course.

From that he draws a flat conclusion: "LLMs are not tools." and "LLMs are automation." His example is food. "A drive-thru is not a tool for cooking, it is automation for avoiding cooking."

The essay's central cost is learning. A person who makes a request and waits is not building skill at the task, Hickey writes, but guessing at the current behaviour of a system that a software update can change. He gives a custom burger order and a joke file called "voodoo.md" full of incantations as examples. "You have traded working with the world to working for a capricious robot."

He applies the same test to reading. A Kindle is wielded; an LLM summary is not. "It read the papers, not you."

He also objects to the vocabulary. "Tools don't get 'misaligned'," Hickey writes, and they do not go rogue.

The October 12 reply on yyhh.org

The rebuttal, "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill," is dated Monday, October 12 and is credited to Huahai, an author on the yyhh.org blog. The page gives no job title. It reached the top of Hacker News with 676 points.

Huahai accepts the dictionary and turns it around. "Even by his definition, an LLM can be something a human wields." The post argues that predictability and reliability are ways to rate a tool, not conditions for being one, and that compilers and spreadsheets automate work and are still tools.

On skill, the reply is blunt. "Picking up a saw does not guarantee a straight cut." And: "Tools can amplify poor judgment as readily as good judgment."

Huahai concedes one point. Hickey's worry about reading is fair when a summary replaces the paper, the post says, though an LLM can also support a careful read. The line it wants drawn runs between "wielding an instrument with skill and delegating work without adequate understanding or oversight."

Where the 303-point thread split

Position	Who	Argument
Automation, not a tool	BatchJob, Barrin92	An indeterministic system cannot offer mastery, and delegation erodes skill
Toolness is a spectrum	didibus, atleastoptimal	Hickey replied "Toolness is a spectrum," per didibus; use sets the position
Depends on the harness	iLemming, NateEag	The surrounding harness is the tool; Claude needs it to call rm
Narrow private definition	xhevahir	"Tool" is a family-resemblance word and Hickey has picked a narrow sense

Commenter dasil003 argued that the label has a political edge: calling AI a tool keeps a human accountable for what it does.

What neither Hickey nor Huahai measures

Both pieces argue from definitions and analogies. Neither cites a study or a measurement of skill loss, output quality or time saved, so the central question of whether delegation costs people ability stays a claim on both sides.

Software projects are already writing policy on that question. QGIS merged a closed-door rule on AI-written contributions, and Anthropic moved its monorepo off Git as machine-driven merges outgrew the old tool.

One fact separates the sources. Huahai dates Hickey's essay October 11, while the LinkedIn page and the gist mirror both show October 12. Hickey's own reply on the toolness point appears only in the Hacker News thread, quoted by a commenter, so it is not independently confirmed.