The AmplifierYour path · Avoider · Band 2
The Principled Avoider
You have engaged with the question and deliberately decided not to use the tools, or to use them only narrowly.
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In brief
Avoider Avoider · Band 2. You have engaged with the question and deliberately decided not to use the tools, or to use them only narrowly. Your reasons are values — quality of craft, ethical concern, distrust of the companies, attachment to the way you have always worked — and they are honestly held. From inside your head you are doing the right thing and the people using the tools are taking shortcuts. What the placement says is that the position has become more rigid than the values that built it. A person who has integrated their values can use AI selectively where it serves them and decline it where it does not. The Principled Avoider has hardened the value into a refusal that no longer distinguishes between cases.
The work
Recovery is not giving up the values. It is returning to them. Identify what your values are actually trying to protect. Then ask, for each task in your work, whether using AI on that specific task would harm or help what you are protecting. The answers will not be the same for every task. Having done this carefully, you look different from outside — but the values are intact, held more honestly.
Risks to watch
Two or three of these will appear on your result, chosen for your pattern of answers. Work on one at a time.
Discovering the value is partly habit and fear
What feels like a clear principle will turn out, on examination, to be partly reflex. Sit with that; do not rush past it.
Identity loss
You may be known in your circles as the person who does not use these tools. Changing posture will briefly feel like losing that. It is a refinement, not a loss.
Overcorrecting
The risk after this band is not dependency. It is performative engagement — using the tools for show. The framework protects you if you actually use it.
Your roadmap
Write down, alone, what your refusal is protecting. Then run the Decision Filter on your real task list and mark, task by task, where the tool serves that value and where it would not. Run one of the "serves" tasks through the framework. Retake in six months.
Read: Chapters 6, 10 and 13.
Start the roadmap.
The placement is the diagnosis. The work is everything that happens after.