A software engineer revisits the 19th-century American folk tale of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced a steam-powered drill to prove human superiority, won, and died from the exertion. He maps the story onto today's AI moment: Boris Cherny, creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic, famously said that "coding is largely solved" — the author's steam engine rolling into the tunnel.

The author, programming since the mid-2000s and professionally since 2010, admits feeling the same dread watching an LLM produce in seconds a Python script that would have cost him an hour. Yet he finds AI output generally inferior to skilled human code, partly because communicating requirements trips up humans too — that's what project management exists for — and partly because of technical limits like context windows. Still, "good enough" output has its place: skeletons to refine, one-off throwaway scripts, and occasionally code exactly as he would have written it.

His proposed middle ground is quality: a skilled developer uses AI as a force multiplier to produce the same standard of code, faster. If the process of making matters more than the result, AI isn't for you; if you need a job done, it helps — but review never goes away, since human slop also ships unreviewed.

Zooming out, he argues mechanization historically reduced human suffering: machines took over tunnel digging and farm labor that destroyed bodies, freeing people for less punishing work. He acknowledges the real, immediate costs of automation-driven job loss and the grievance of workers whose output trained the models now competing with them, predicting a Napster-style reckoning over training data.

The essay's sharpest point is about the tale's ending: John Henry won his duel and it didn't matter — the C and O railroad kept running regardless, and his legacy survives only as folklore riding aboard the machine's success. The engineer who refuses AI on principle to out-code the machine is fighting the same symbolic duel, and duels don't move industries. The author's utopian hope — machines eventually handling all necessary labor so humans can live freely — won't arrive automatically; like the eight-hour workday, it must be fought for. He just doesn't think the fight looks like a duel.