**[I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline](https://openpath.quest/2026/i-am-retiring-from-tech-to-live-offline/)** I've seen a lot of posts on forums from people threatening to quit their careers over AI. This is _not_ one of those: Chad Whitacre is taking concrete steps, starting with this typewritten, scanned letter > I'm retiring from tech. Well, "retiring" is euphemistic. I'm stepping away from tech, and that includes Open Source. [...] > > AI was the last straw. Have you heard of that island off India where the indigenous population kills any outsiders fool-hardy enough to land? They are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday, or at the very least should not want to see completely extinguished. A reminder. Never forget your roots. Here in Pennsylvania we have the Amish performing a similar function. Significantly less hostile, though still set apart, they bear witness to what was normal for all of us a couple short centuries ago: horse and buggy, wood stoves and lanterns. My intent is to be AI Amish, which means Internet Amish. Not 1780, but 1980. Neo-Amish. I'm fine driving a car and flipping a lightswitch, by which I mean that they don't make me into something I hate, which AI and [struck through: social media] [handwritten above: doomscrolling] do. I'll admit that at first I wasn't entirely sure if this was serious. Then I found this earlier post by Chad from Feb 19 2026, [Spitting Out the Agentic Kool-Aid](https://openpath.quest/2026/spitting-out-the-agentic-kool-aid/): > I figured I’d better taste the Kool-Aid in order to form an opinion, so I dove into Claude Code with Opus 4.5 on a side project. I spent three 12+ hour days with it. I was intoxicated. My family was weirded out. [...] > > It weirded me out too, when I unplugged for a long weekend. Something felt off. It was like I had another “person” in my head, sharing my inner monologue—but the “person” was a computer system owned by a budding megacorp. > > [...] I am now also committing myself to disembarking from the titantic of technological accelerationism. > > All efforts to address the problems of invasive technology are worthwhile, even those that are only partially effective. For my part, I have started trying to return more fully to a pre-screen, analog life. It's accompanied by [a video version of the essay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCC76jmmzkc) which I found touching and sincere. Chad has been trying to solve the open source sustainability problem [for _years_](https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/23/the-open-source-sustainability-crisis/) \- I talked with him about this at PyCon 2025 in Cleveland. That's a very tough nut to crack, and the disruption caused by AI looks to be making it even harder. I'm glad that the [Open Source Endowment](https://endowment.dev/) will continue without him. I'm very much going to miss his online voice. Via [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323683) Tags: [open-source](https://simonwillison.net/tags/open-source), [ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai), [generative-ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai), [llms](https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms), [chad-whitacre](https://simonwillison.net/tags/chad-whitacre), [ai-ethics](https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics), [deep-blue](https://simonwillison.net/tags/deep-blue)