I am one of the lucky engineers who works at a very AI-forward company. I get nearly unlimited Claude tokens per month, and as such, I never have to spend any time worrying about token budgets, using small models, plans, subagents. I just spend my time talking to the best and brightest: Claude Fable 5.

I am also one of the lucky few junior engineers to be hired into a company in the AI era. This is not a scenario where AI is merely accelerating my existing software dev work, but a situation where my work is shaped by AI. I have never programmed in a production environment without the help of AI. My architecture decisions, the limits of my knowledge, my lack of past work experience… are all filled by AI.

This situation could take us down several tangents. Is my work better or worse because of this? Is the architecture being designed by AI really sound? How necessary am I, the human in the loop? (For the record, I would argue pretty necessary).

But the simple question I want to dig into today is: Is this good for me? Does talking to Fable all day make me smarter or dumber?

THE CASE FOR DUMBER

This is the case I think we’ve heard before. The studies show it. I’m doing “cognitive offloading”. I think this has two clear effects: for one, I literally am learning less, but more deeply, I am also offloading some important logical decisions to another being.

There is a lot of stuff I simply don’t have to learn anymore. I don’t need to know how our testing library works, or how we have type checking configured. I don’t have to remember specific commands to check for specific logs.

But, like, this doesn’t feel so bad. After all, I can just ask Claude to explain it to me. I ultimately end up with the same knowledge right?

Early into this AI thing Ezra Klein said something nice about this. He said that he used to think that learning was like it is in the Matrix. You “jack in” and you download the information, and you’ve read the book. But that’s just not at all how it works. He thinks that the creative insights, the connections you make, come from spending time with the material. In thinking through the problem yourself.

I think that this is certainly true when it comes to research and writing. And mostly true when it comes to software development.

To give a specific example, when it comes to learning a new programming language, I find that the only real way to learn is by doing. This is why CS curriculums are project-based. You cannot learn to code just by researching the syntax and patterns of a language.

But, when I code in a new language with Claude, this is essentially what I am doing. I may complete a project, but I don’t understand the language, not really. And it’s because, even when I am reading all of the code, I’m not sitting with it, I’m not physically typing it, and I’m not debugging like I used to. If I am curious, after Claude writes some code, I’ll sometimes ask: “why did you do this?” and it explains it to me. But “learning” this way is the same as reading a book about Python, not doing any of the exercises, and then claiming to know Python.

In this way it seems pretty clear that I am maybe not even learning anything at all. But there is a deeper case here: I am actually building up mental shortcuts that cut off my own ability to think through problems.

For all kinds of decisions I find myself relying on Claude, I find this even for things that I think I could do myself, but are only just too difficult to do by myself. This one is very tangible, it makes me feel dumber. I feel the short circuit happening, I feel my brain falling back to “just ask Claude”. It feels like a crutch.

Someone will ask me why I made a decision I made, and I have to ask Claude for the explanation. I am certainly not alone in this, and this is becoming endemic in the software industry, with AI being used to build whole projects and make high level architecture decisions. But I think it is potentially especially dangerous for someone early career like me. I am not simply using Claude to elaborate on an idea I had, or a pattern I know, but to literally make the decisions for me.

And perhaps a final way in which Claude is making me dumber, is that it is making me think that Claude is smart. I do find it hard to read Claude-written prose, but the ideas are often clever. Or at least they seem clever. In all honesty I don’t even know anymore. Claude certainly seems smart to me, but sometimes Claude makes basic errors that I wouldn’t make. I know deep down that it’s possible that Claude isn’t really that smart, that I’ve just slowly and unconsciously lowered my standard for intelligence. In some sense, it’s possible I’ve lost my ability to discern between smart and dumb, between good and bad thinking.

In short this sounds damning. I cannot write the languages I use all day. I am letting Claude make logical decisions on my behalf, strengthening my “ask Claude” muscle instead of my decision-making. And, potentially scariest, I’m not even smart enough to tell if Claude is actually smart or not.

THE CASE FOR SMARTER

I think this case probably would have been much harder to make before the release of Claude Fable. If you’re reading this and you haven’t had the chance to work with Fable and you’re thinking “yeah I mean AI is good but it makes mistakes and you have to watch it carefully”. Fable, in my experience, does not really make mistakes.

It does what it is told. Its thinking is clear. It pushes back when it feels something isn’t right. It double checks when something seems suspicious. It looks and asks for context instead of jumping to conclusions. I don’t know how to describe it. Fable is maybe the first AI model I’ve worked with that I feel like has good instincts.

With that said let me take a step back, though it should be clear where I am going. Have you ever talked with someone smarter than you? Someone who thinks faster than you? Someone for whom things that seem complicated to you seem simple to them? Even if you are very smart I hope that you have met someone like that.

I find that when I talk to someone smarter than me, two things happen. First, in the moment, after an initial feeling of dumbness, I find myself rising to the occasion. I would compare this to a team or a player “playing up” against a high level competition in a sport or a video game. When confronted with someone who knows so much more than me, or thinks so much faster, the conversation pulls me up. I feel myself thinking faster, and attempting to match their level. In some sense, talking to someone smarter than me makes me think better, if only briefly. And so then, second, after the conversion I become extremely interested in talking to them. In learning from them, in imitating them, and in learning to think like them. I come out of these conversations both feeling smarter and having learned from the person.

I felt this when I talked to some of my professors in college, or even some of my classmates. I feel this when I talk to senior engineers at my company. Every conversation is rewarding and I learn a little bit of what they know and how they think. If I’m able to challenge them on something it’s because I’m rising to their level just for a moment.

And so, I feel this with Claude Fable. Claude is an engineer who knows every programming language, every pattern, every best practice and every industry standard. In this way, Claude is easily the most knowledgeable being I’ve every spoken to. But Claude also thinks deeply about every problem you hand it and never gets tired of explaining itself. Yes Claude is fallible, yes Claude is unable to express these ideas succinctly, but it is undeniably one of the smartest beings I have ever talked to.

It seems obvious then. Spending so much time talking to and working with “someone” that smart certainly makes me smarter. If I had unlimited time to work with a staff engineer who had unlimited patience for me, I would undoubtedly learn a lot from them. And I would undoubtedly spend more of my time thinking better.

This is a little abstract, I will try to put it in a way that directly counters the “dumber” case.

First, I absolutely do learn when working with Claude. Now, I don’t learn mechanical things like how to write programming languages, and there are certainly gaps in my knowledge, but I am learning industry best practices, system designs, and smart solutions to already-solved problems. This is stuff that I would need to learn with or without Claude, but I am learning much faster working with Claude. This benefit may not be as pronounced in someone who has a lot of industry experience, but for me, I am able to learn to work with systems that would have usually taken me years of working to build familiarity with. In this way, I think that a major reason Claude makes me smarter is that it allows me to work on problems that I would otherwise need a lot more experience to even be able to start on.

Again, imagine that I had unlimited time to work with a staff engineer. The “dumber” case would frame this as a “crutch” I am building, that I am not learning and thinking for myself, but this is greatly oversimplified.

As I discussed at the start of this section, I am not just “learning systems and best practices” when I work with Claude in the same way that I could learn them by reading a book or downloading them into my brain. I am using them in practice with the help of Claude. I am doing higher-level engineering thinking all day long. Yes, Claude is making some decisions, but that is not the same as offloading, because I can learn from the decisions. Because I see the decisions play out in my work.

In a broader sense we can play the counterfactual here: If I worked this past year without Claude, would I be smarter or dumber? I think it is clear that the No-Claude Ron would be better at coding by hand, and have deeper knowledge of some systems, but the Claude Ron would be a better engineer with much more experience and better technical instincts.

CONCLUSION

It is hard to do an apples to apples comparison. If we are living in a world where AI exists and continues to get better, it is obvious to me that the higher-level engineering thinking skills are more valuable, and thus I am “smarter” in the ways that the time demands of me. If AI was never created, then perhaps the no-Claude Ron is “smarter” for that world, if only because he can actually write code.

My opinion on this is that, in the context of my work, Claude is making me smarter. I am building higher leverage skills and working on harder problems. I am no longer doing menial coding and research and debugging, no longer building skills for an era that is already over.

But I even will say that, if we tried to do this apples to apples, in some abstract sense, I still think that Claude is making me smarter overall. As the counterfactual makes clear, there is a tradeoff that happens when you use AI, that is to say I am getting smarter and dumber by using Claude all day. In terms of pure knowledge the difference comes down most to what I am learning, not how much. And in terms of my ability to think, I think that the amount of good thinking I am doing with Claude outweighs the risk of me relying on Claude as a crutch.

Finally, I will soften this by saying, it is hard to know. I don’t believe I have AI psychosis, but it is possible that my standards for intelligence are much lower than they used to be. I am also worried that building this “Claude crutch” has impacts that make me dumber outside of work. Do I think less critically now, and fall back to asking AI for other things in my life? Am I doing this on things where the process is more important, where the higher-level “learnings” are lower leverage? But that is a topic for another essay.

Appendix

Wanted to take a minute to add some caveats / questions that came up while I was writing this that didn’t fit cleanly into this essay. Some of these may turn into follow up essays.

• It is possible that Claude is not really making me smarter or dumber. This case would say that Claude is simply letting me not waste a senior engineer’s time asking questions, and lets me “skip” some of the entry-level learning I would have needed to do anyway. This is more a statement about Claude replacing and accelerating a function that already exists (talking to a senior engineer, my own research), rather than changing anything meaningful about how I’m thinking. (I would describe this as making me slightly smarter)

• There are good and bad ways of using Claude. I see many people becoming wholly reliant on Claude, and it seems to me that it is likely that they are not smarter because of it. The standard I hold myself to is essentially: If someone else will be reading it, I will make sure I understand it and can defend it myself. This means that any document I write, I write myself in my own words, and that I read every line of code that Claude writes on my behalf. I definitely think that this standard is critical to me learning from Claude, instead of offloading onto Claude.

• Related: Claude certainly makes me feel smarter, but the models have a tendency to be sycophants. If it is true I’ve lost some of my ability to distinguish smart from dumb, then this might be biasing me in the wrong direction.

• A lot of the “smarter” argument is predicated on me being early career. It is likely the case that there is a point in which Claude will stop making me smarter. If I already had a lot of industry experience, or was substantially smarter than Claude, then I think that the benefits might be smaller. The downsides too, are also likely much smaller. And in my opinion in this case, Claude probably mostly allows high level engineers to prioritize higher-leverage work.

• I think that writing is probably one of the skills that should be cultivated without AI. Producing an AI generated piece is certainly not the same mentally as taking the time to think through and write your argument yourself. At least, I am not sure what the higher-leverage skill you are building by having AI do the writing, or even help you with writing. (though this probably depends on the type of writing you are doing). I sympathize with Ezra Klein on not making connections unless you sit with the material, but I am conflicted on using AI for research.

• I find myself constantly writing code and working on projects that, in a pre-AI world, I would have no business working on, and need to rely on Claude to maintain that performance. Simultaneously, as mentioned in the essay, I often feel dumb when I have to fall back to asking Claude for something I should know. Am I losing the ability to really stretch my limits and work hard? Am I becoming just plain-old lazy? Am I being dishonest about my abilities?

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I think every programmer has noticed it. There used to be something special about the moment when a problem just “clicked”. There was a shining moment of insight where the solution laid itself in front of you. I used to race to do my CS homework for exactly this reason. I was addicted to thinking through and fighting through problems, just for that feeling of solving them in the end. I loved just staring at my computer for hours, looking at logs, even drawing the problem on paper.

But now we have a shortcut. I don’t think I need to go into it.

Well, maybe a little: This might be a hot take, but I think using AI is also extremely fun and addictive. I genuinely love working with Claude. Yes, “working with Claude”. I can’t believe I’m even saying it like that.

But, as productive as I am now, as fun as “vibe coding” is, it doesn’t scratch the same itch.

Leetle [dot] app

At the very end of 2024, when I was a senior in college, slightly inspired by Advent of Code, I built (with AI help, in age of Sonnet 3.6), a website called Leetle to help me with my interview prep. At the time, I couldn’t get myself to prepare for technical interviews, so I was failing them. I had the programming knowledge and the DSA knowledge, but I didn’t have the reps in solving problems under pressure.

So, I built Leetle, maybe obviously, as a play on LeetCode and Wordle. Every day, there is a new, simple coding challenge that you have 6 attempts to solve.

This was a side project for me that was good for my Twitter clout and for my portfolio, but I built it with the intention of actually doing the challenge myself every day. I think this is a project that only makes sense to even build in this transition period between the old world and the new one. I could have LLMs generate and verify the challenges, then do the challenge myself, completely blind to it. It’s a moment when I still needed to do LeetCode to pass my technical interviews, but I could use AI to build my own LeetCode. One that was more gamified and worked on mobile.

But shortly after I built Leetle, I did get a job.

It’s pretty undeniable that Leetle helped me land this job, both as a portfolio project and as a way to practice. But a side effect of getting a job was that I stopped playing the Leetle daily challenge. Once I got a job I decided I hated Leetle and LeetCode, DSA and practicing coding. I just wanted to build. All of this made me get lazy and forget to even tell Claude to generate new challenges for months at a time. I all but abandoned Leetle as a project.

Coding circa 2026

It is now March of 2026. More than a year after I built and launched Leetle. And for the first time since I was deep into job apps and technical interviews, I find myself playing Leetle again.

I don’t think of Leetle as mainly an interview-prep tool anymore. Ironically I think it’s closer to what I originally intended it for it: Wordle, for programmers, for me1. The problems aren’t hard, but it’s a small place for me to really think through a problem, type code by hand, and try out solutions myself. With Leetle now I can feel just a little bit of that “click” before jumping back into the trenches with Claude.

I spend all day at work coding with Claude. When I come home, if I have a side project idea, I can spin it up in an instant with Codex or Claude Code. I know if I really cared about coding, then I should build the old-fashioned way without LLMs! But, to me, there is a joy in building with LLMs. I genuinely do like it. And I’m not nostalgic for the old times all the time. In fact, I have been iterating on and upgrading Leetle more than ever thanks to LLMs. I’ve added features that would have taken me months, in hours with LLMs.

But sometimes I miss the “click”. And so I enjoy Leetle in a way that I never did before. I actually play Leetle like Wordle. Coding, for fun.

Coding, for fun

The point here isn’t Leetle itself, this is just my project and my outlet.

But I used to enjoy coding for coding’s sake, not for building’s sake. Write code on paper. Crack open the old LeetCode account. Open up a Codepen and center a div. Have Claude build you your own Leetle. Hell, play Monkeytype with the language set to Python. I think you’ll be surprised by how fun it is.

But there’s this wave of people and discourse and real studies that show that working out isn’t just good for your body and your muscles. It’s not just good for you health, it’s like, good for you mood. It’s like good for your sleep and for your energy.

I hear this from people in my real life, like “I feel better when I’m working out”. Look, either I’m doing it wrong or for some reason none of this applies to me. I feel like shit after working out. “But you just said you feel good—” immediately after I feel good and energized. But when I’m working out (like in a time in my life when I’m working out consistently), I get headaches, I feel weaker, I don’t sleep well. I could barely get out of bed all week because I was just so fucking tired. This doesn’t happen to me when I’m being a slob. I didn’t work out for years and felt great.

But here I am, working out again. Now maybe you’re thinking something like, oh it’s because you’re working out too hard, or you’re not recovering or something I AM. Be serious. I’m obviously not working out that hard. Like a quick 10-15min run. Some machines. Bench press dumbbell curl. I don’t do leg day. Only 3x a week. And what do I have to show for it? I just feel so tired. Maybe I’m not working out hard enough? That doesn’t seem right.

Anyway, I’ve only been working out seriously again for a couple weeks. Maybe things will mellow out. Maybe there is other factors affecting me. But all of these people and all of this data talking about how you’re more “mentally clear” or “more energized” when you’re exercising a bunch just doesn’t make sense to me. I think you’re all lying and coping in order to make yourself feel good about doing something you don’t want to do but you know you should do. I mean I’m sure it’s true for some people. Idk. Maybe I’m just so out of shape that trying to get in shape makes me feel more out of shape.

Maybe it’s that my body is expending more energy, so of course I feel more tired. Like these studies and anecdotes just don’t hold up to basic logic.

You know what I do endorse and do think makes me feel better? Drinking water. Holy wow I love drinking water. I’ve been on hella LMNT lately (like Liquid IV but even SALTIER) and I just love being hydrated. It gets rid of like 40% of my problems. Honestly it’s been a game changer.

Note how I said only 40%. What helps with the other 60% of my problems. Well I have another endorsement for you. Caffeine. Wow. What a rush.

Some backstory on me. I never drank coffee in high school. I barely did in college. I had this mentality that I had enough energy, and that I would drink caffeine when I really needed it. (I think my 14 year old self truly imagined myself as that fucking squirrel from Over the Hedge. Like not hyperactive, but like, I thought when I drank coffee, I would become the fucking Flash). Now in college I did go “super-speed” every once in a while, like finals week, and eventually I starting ripping it more and more. I fell in love with the trend of buying little drinks. You know I finally got it. It was starting to click. (And honestly, I think my 14 year old self was vindicated. Spoilers for the next paragraph, I don’t feel this anymore now that I drink coffee every day, but I remember the first time I had cold brew. This was my first real touch of caffeine. It was like I was floating. I was definitely thinking 2-3x faster than normal).

Then, I started a real job. And I started drinking coffee every day. It’s amazing. Now I haven’t gone all the way to drinking energy drinks yet, mostly because I don’t like the taste… (jk, it’s the squirrel thing again, y’all aren’t ready for my real lock-in).

But seriously, it’s just been a huge unlock to not rely on just “getting enough sleep” to feel awake all day. I can just drink another cup of coffee. Really need to lock in on something? Another cup of coffee? Oh we’re walking around now? Let’s go get some coffee. (I do know some people who have energy even when they don’t get enough sleep. I’M NOT ONE OF THEM)

Now potentially there is some correlation going on here, maybe I feel more tired because I’m drinking more caffeine than I ever was before? And now I’m like, reliant on it for energy? But that doesn’t really seem right. Look I didn’t mean to write another article about coffee.

Anyway now that I drink coffee every day if I ever stop, I get one of the worst headaches imaginable. Like genuinely I start panicking if it’s like 3pm and I haven’t had coffee because I start to feel the withdrawal headache in the (literal) back of my mind. Does this suck? Yes. But, from what I can tell, like millions of people are living like this so. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not like I could just stop? I would get a headache? For like weeks apparently? That is a bit much honestly.

I’m thinking about it now and like. Let’s say apocalypse happens tomorrow, zombies everywhere nuclear bomb. And I don’t have my coffee? I’m going to be getting a nuclear headache and turn into a zombie. That was bad. But it’s a real fear! My life will suck in the apocalypse for at least the first two weeks, if only because of the headaches.

To wrap up, I want to tie this together with another thought I had when I was 14. If the zombie apocalypse happened, would I just have to have braces forever? Who would even be qualified to take them off? What if there were no more orthodontists? I guess that would be worse than having a headache for two weeks, braces forever.

In a sense my body now has found some kind of equilibrium. Working out makes me tired, coffee makes me awake. I think this is fine and probably what most people in their 30s feel like. But I am only 22. Anyway.

Should I start taking preworkout?

Weird Trader Joe’s

The reason I call it that is because it’s weird. To start, the whole thing is underground. You enter the Trader Joe’s then take an escalator down to it.

Thinking back to that Acquired episode, Trader Joe himself seemed to want to keep the stores small and dense. Limited SKUs, limited sprawl, stuff packed in every aisle. But weird Trader Joe’s is laid out like this: Half of the store is sparse, with not enough aisles so somehow items are still stuffed onto the shelves. But the other half, the checkout section, on the other hand, is 20 registers packed into two rows, with one line wrapping literally all the way through the store.

But, I mean, it’s clear people get their groceries there. It’s always packed. But again, it’s packed in a weird way. In my Trader Joe’s experience, it is usually crowded, aisles are bustling and there are long lines. But weird Trader Joe’s layout creates a whole new type of Trader Joe’s experience. You cannot get to half of the items in the store without being in line, or by awkwardly walking by the line while not being in line! Frankly, I don’t think this is what Trader Joe envisioned.

It was while I was in that horrible line that something caught my eye. Trader Joe’s Ready To Use Espresso Coffee. 15 espresso shots. $10. In a purple plastic bottle.

The K-Mini & Roommate Coffee

I am not a coffee fanatic. See I love coffee, and I drink it nearly every day, but my love is impure. I do like the taste of coffee, but realistically, I like it as a minor flavor in a coffee-drink.

In thinking about it, maybe this is a very normal take. I like my little drinks! I like my milk and sugar and my Iced Mint Mojitos and Chocolaccinos. My Starbucks order will have no less than 10 words in it. I only write that “my love is impure” because I’ve been surrounded by way too many coffee fanatics at my work! “See you need to get the beans just right or whatever, you need a good pour, you need this machine or that machine.” I just don’t do any of that!1

What I tend to do, is use a good old-fashioned coffee machine (what I’ve learned is called something like a “single serve K-cup drip coffee maker”, or some combination of those words). Preferably a shitty one that isn’t too complicated and that I can’t break. Preferably, the Keurig K-Mini, pictured below. And just give me the worst K-cups too. Just like some Starbucks ones or like Target brand if you can.

Before I left for college, I found that my Dad, who I had thought to be a prolific coffee drinker, had replaced his nicer Keurig, with, not a fancy espresso machine or some complicated contraption, but with a Keurig K-Mini. When I got to college, my roommate had one of these. In some sense “roommate coffee” is the best way to describe what this makes.2

But when I got to my first day of work, along with all of the fancy machines (which, thanks to chatgpt, I now understand to be an espresso machine, a cold brew machine, a pour-over, and a French press), I encountered the Keurig K-Elite. This is, as far as I can tell, the Keurig K-Mini but you can pour different size cups, though I’m not sure why you would ever want that. It is perfect and I use it every day.

So honestly, this is how I like my coffee-at-home. Roommate coffee. Load up the K-Mini with the cheapest K-cup you can find. Hope the machine doesn’t just give you water. Then add just a comical amount of milk and sugar. Even add ice if you’re feeling like it. Either way, the coffee will be lukewarm. Which is just how I like it.

But this is not how you make the worst coffee at home.

Terrible Coffee

Unsurprisingly, I bought the Trader Joe’s Ready To Use Espresso Coffee. I’m honestly not even sure what it is. Probably just espresso? Whatever the case, this morning I set out to craft my own “little drink”: an iced vanilla latte.

The plan was simple. Trader Joe’s Espresso. Milk. Ton of sugar. Splash of vanilla extract. Two or three ice cubes.

The coffee was doomed from the start. As expected, the Trader Joe’s Espresso does not taste very good (in my “research” for this article, I found many Reddit threads raving about it, though it seems like they like the caffeine content and bear the taste). Even so, the flavor of the espresso shouldn’t be a problem because we’re adding a ton of sugar. The sugar I’m using? Also Trader Joe’s! This should be a match made in heaven, but for anyone who has used Trader Joe’s sugar before, you know that it is fucking huge. I might as well have tried to dissolve a pebble into this drink. On top of that. THE DRINK ISN’T HOT.

The sugar didn’t dissolve. The vanilla wasn’t strong enough. What I got was a bitter & sour glass of “coffee”. With no water either, it’s consistency was basically that of milk.

At last I had done it. Something worse than Roommate coffee. Terrible coffee.

Wow it was hard to get down. But the last sip, the one that pulled all of the undissolved sugar into my mouth, was heaven.

Variation: For an extra-thick “mocha” variant of terrible coffee, substitute normal milk for a Fairlife protein shake (30g of protein). Jesus.

What a ride.

I would never claim to be a longtime fan of the Alien or Predator franchises. In fact I am a very new fan. But I am a diehard new fan (of Alien at least). I watched the original Alien about a year ago, then 6 months later went on a binge of Predator, Prey, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, Prometheus, and Alien: Covenant in about a week. A little later, I watched Alien: Romulus. I didn’t like Predator or Prey enough to continue the series.

My opinions on these movies range from “pretty good” to “pretty bad”, but there is one thing that I think all Alien and Predator fans can agree on: the Alien movies all have about the same plot as each other. And, assuming nothing major is different about the later Predator movies, the same goes for Predator. This dawned on me as early as Aliens, when I wrote this in my Letterboxd review:

This is the same movie as Alien.

And by the time I got to Romulus, I appreciated this fact fully:

If the other Alien movies didn’t exist, this would probably be the best movie ever right? … I can’t wait to see what this franchise does next (probably the same movie) (i like these but it’s now 7 of the same fucking movie).

That being said, I definitely like Alien movies, and I definitely like them more than I liked the Predator movies I did watch. So, about 6 more months after I watched Romulus, I decided to jump into the Alien spinoff movies, AVP and AVP: Requiem.

A LOT has been said about these movies, mostly that they are bad. But, while I don’t think they’re good, I want to try to present a new take: AVP is a bad Alien movie, and AVP: Requiem is a really bad Predator movie.

AVP is a bad Alien movie

At its core, AVP is a classic Alien movie. It follows all of the same beats: a team in an enclosed space, escaping Aliens, and our our sole female protagonist barely makes it out, this time, with the help of a predator. The setup is actually almost identical to Prometheus, and that sense of isolation really makes it feel like Alien or Aliens.

But, it is by no means a good Alien movie. To be fair, the effects are great and the fights are exciting (and well-lit). I did like this movie a lot, but not as an Alien movie. I think that Alien is at its best when it is 1. actually scary (AVP is not at all…), and 2. exploring big-ish sci-fi themes. This movie. I mean it takes place in 2004. The only world-building is done very overtly in a flashback! And there are no androids! This is a huge part of the Alien lore! It just really lacks that mysterious-existential-anti-corporate-edge of the good Alien movies. So while AVP categorically an Alien movie, it’s not a very good one.

AVP: Requiem is a bad Predator movie

This movie might be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. And SEEN is a strong word. This is not just an aesthetic complaint, this is a crucial part of why this movie is worse than AVP. In AVP, even when the story was boring or the characters weren’t being interesting, you were watching Predators and Aliens fight! This is not true in this movie. Even when the Aliens and Predator DO fight, which is rare, you cannot see a thing. The ultimate battle between the Predator and the (horribly named) PredAlien is complete visual nonsense.

And in my initial review of AVP: Requiem I wrote:

If I wanted to watch aliens dunk on plumbers and electricians I would have watched Alien.

But in thinking about it, I realized that AVP: Requiem is formulaically much more of a Predator movie! A group of people are hunted out in the open by an alien threat, only this time it’s Predators and Aliens hunting. In fact, other than the Aliens being there, AVP: Requiem shares almost nothing with the formula or feeling of any of the Alien movies.

But, to be clear, this is a really bad Predator movie. In the original, Schwarzenegger’s men are picked off and skinned alive for most of the movie’s runtime! But! There is this warrior-code thing going on, there’s honor and stakes and all of that. In AVP: Requiem, no one fights back, the Aliens and Predators kill high schoolers and pregnant women and babies for shock value. And ultimately, the film rewrites the Predator ending, instead of the humans winning, the government NUKES THE ENTIRE TOWN. What a mess!

What does it all mean?

Alien movies ask us big questions: Why are we here? Do corporations have our best interests in mind? What is up with that space jockey? And why did that girl run away in a straight line in Prometheus?

Predator movies ask us small questions: Who is the biggest guy? Will they get to the chopper?

Alien vs Predator movies ask a single question, a far more important question: who would win, an Alien or a Predator?

In some sense the AVP movies try to give us a meta-answer this question: it is the Alien franchise versus the Predator franchise. The formulas go back to back and head to head in the crossovers, with AVP representing Alien and AVP: Requiem representing Predator.

This is, of course, not really a fair fight because AVP: Requiem almost completely butchers the Predator formula. And it is also just a much worse movie. But, in looking at these movies as Alien and Predator movies, I think I saw more clearly how different the formulas are, and why I keep coming back to one but not the other.

Or maybe I wrote this whole thing because I’m annoyed that the Aliens were turned into Predator-fodder in both movies. Suck it Predator fans, your movies will always be worse.1