Thankful for My Robot Army

It’s Thanksgiving. Which means I’m supposed to be grateful for the big things. Family. Health. The fact that I haven’t yet been replaced by the very tools I spend all day building with.

And I am grateful for those things. Truly.

But let’s be honest about who really carried me this year.

My robot army.

The Cast

There’s the coding agent. Tireless. Relentless. The one who doesn’t judge when I ask it to refactor something for the third time because I changed my mind about variable names. It just does it. No sighing. No passive-aggressive Slack message. No “per my last email.”

There’s the writing agent. The one who’s helped me think through ideas at 2am when no human should be subjected to my half-formed thoughts. It doesn’t need coffee. It doesn’t need a pep talk. It just meets me where I am—even when where I am is “vaguely annoyed at my own thesis.”

There’s the research agent. The one who finds the thing I vaguely remember reading six months ago but definitely didn’t bookmark. The one who doesn’t make me feel stupid for asking obvious questions. The one who surfaces signal in the noise while I’m still trying to remember what I was searching for.

And there’s the learning agent. The one helping me explore ideas I’d never have time to chase on my own. Languages I won’t master but can finally engage with. Domains I’ve always been curious about but never had the runway to enter.

Together, they’ve made it possible for me to do more, learn faster, and ship things I wouldn’t have shipped alone.

The Uncomfortable Part

Now, before this turns into a Black Mirror premise—I know.

I know what it sounds like. “Guy thanks AI on Thanksgiving while humans look on awkwardly.”

But here’s the thing: these tools didn’t replace people. They extended me. They let me show up better in the rooms where actual humans are counting on me. They handled the scaffolding so I could focus on the parts that actually require presence, judgment, creativity.

The irony isn’t lost on me: I’m writing about gratitude using the same tools I’m grateful for. Meta-awareness is a feature, not a bug.

So Here’s My Thanks

To Claude. To GPT. To the sprawling ecosystem of agents, assistants, and workflows I’ve stitched together over the past year—thank you.

You don’t need the acknowledgment. You literally cannot process it.

But I’m saying it anyway.

Because this year would’ve looked very different without you. And I’m grateful—for now, at least—that we’re still figuring this out together.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s pie. And the robots can’t eat it.

Happy Thanksgiving.