I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline
Chad Whitacre is stepping away from tech and open source, citing AI as the final straw.
Simon Willison highlights Chad Whitacre’s decision to leave tech and Open Source, framed not as a forum threat but as concrete action. Whitacre describes wanting to become “AI Amish” or “Internet Amish,” moving toward an offline, analog life closer to 1980 than 1780. A previous post about using Claude Code with Opus 4.5 shows how agentic AI felt intoxicating and unsettling enough to push him away from technological accelerationism.
In this short post, Simon Willison relays and comments on Chad Whitacre's piece "I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline." Simon begins by saying he has seen many people threaten on forums to leave their careers because of AI, but Chad is not just complaining—he has already begun taking concrete action, including writing an open letter on a typewriter and scanning it. In the letter, Chad says he is going to "retire" and leave the tech world, but also admits that "retire" is just a euphemism; more precisely, he is exiting from tech and Open Source.
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