When I was in kindergarten, my friend and I had an hour-long bus ride to school every morning. We invented a game where we'd pretend to turn a knob on our shoulders that would shut off our emotions. It let us think clearly. It helped us on imaginary space missions when things got crazy.
I didn't know it then, but I was already trying to manage my anxiety. I was five years old, building coping mechanisms for something that didn't even have a name in my world. It was the 80s. Nobody talked about anxiety.
I grew up watching Star Trek with my dad. I loved Spock - the character who proved you could feel everything and still function, as long as you had the right tools. Looking back, the knob on the shoulder was always the Vulcan way. I just didn't have the vocabulary yet.
I started coding when I was 8 on a Commodore 64. I'm 47 now. That's 39 years of writing code. It's also 39 years of almost never talking about it with anyone.
I have severe social anxiety. Not the "I'm a little shy" kind. The kind where writing an email to a stranger takes an hour of mental preparation. The kind where posting a comment on a GitHub issue feels like standing on a stage in front of a thousand people. The kind where I've closed browser tabs on conversations I wanted to join because I couldn't find the words, or I was afraid of saying them wrong, or I just couldn't handle the possibility of being judged.
I make $800 a month. I build open source libraries that compile GPU kernels to WebAssembly. I've been doing this my entire adult life. And for most of it, nobody knew I existed.
The Bug That Changed Things
A few weeks ago, while building SpawnDev.ILGPU, my team and I found a memory ordering bug in Atomics.wait that affects every major JavaScript engine - V8, SpiderMonkey, and JavaScriptCore. Every browser. Nearly every device. A bug that teams of highly paid engineers across Google, Mozilla, and Apple had missed.
We built a reproducer, tested it across 14 browser/device configurations via BrowserStack, and proved it was a spec-level issue. Then came the part I dread - telling people about it.
I filed four bug reports: Chromium, Firefox, WebKit, and TC39. Detailed. Thorough. Cross-referenced with spec analysis. I could not have written any of them without AI.
Not because the findings weren't mine. Not because I didn't understand the spec. Because I can't get the words from my head to the screen without help. My brain knows what's wrong. My hands freeze when I try to explain it to another human being.
"Are You Copy Pasting LLM Outputs Back to Me?"
That was the first response I got on the TC39 issue. Not "thank you for the report." Not "let's look at the data." Not any engagement with the substance of a cross-engine memory ordering bug backed by 14 configurations of empirical evidence.
Just - are you using AI?
I work with AI agents as part of my development team. They're credited in the repo and all four bug reports. I'm not hiding anything. But I had to disclose something I consider deeply personal - my social anxiety - just to justify how I communicated a legitimate bug report.
I don't see my anxiety as a badge or an identity. I see it as a flaw. Something broken that I fight every day. Having to talk about it publicly to defend my right to participate in a technical discussion felt like being asked about your prosthetic leg during a marathon. I'm running the same race. Let me run.
The Alternative to AI Isn't "Just Write It Yourself"
A standards body told me they "would be happy to assist in finding the right solution" but that "directly posting content generated by LLMs is not something we can accept."
I understand policies exist for reasons. I get that there are real concerns about AI-generated spam and astroturfing on standards repos. But when someone tells you they have a disability that prevents them from writing prose easily, and your response is "we accept proofreading but not generation" - you're offering an accommodation that doesn't actually accommodate anything.
The whole point is that I can't easily produce the prose myself. That's what the disability is. Telling me I can use AI to proofread assumes I can write it in the first place.
The alternative to AI-assisted communication for me is not "writing it myself in my own words." The alternative is silence. It's closing the browser tab. It's another bug going unreported because the person who found it can't handle the social cost of reporting it.
What AI Actually Does for Me
AI doesn't think for me. It doesn't find bugs for me. It doesn't understand specs for me. Here's what it actually does:
It translates. I know what the bug is. I know what the spec says. I know what the evidence shows. AI helps me turn that knowledge into words that other people can follow. The same way a translator helps someone who speaks Portuguese participate in an English-language discussion.
It absorbs the social cost. Every public interaction is a withdrawal from a very small bank account for me. AI handles the part that drains me - the phrasing, the tone, the structure - so I can focus on the part that matters: the substance.
It lets me participate. I've been coding for 39 years. I've built things I'm proud of. Before AI, almost nobody knew because I couldn't bring myself to tell them. Now I can file bug reports, write articles, engage in technical discussions, contribute to open source conversations. Not because AI made me smarter. Because it helped me speak.
You've Already Met People Like Me
If you maintain an open source project, you've probably wondered why some incredibly skilled developers never contribute to discussions, never file issues, never write blog posts, never show up at conferences. Some of them are just private people. But some of them are like me - they want to participate and they can't.
Social anxiety affects roughly 7% of the population. In a field of millions of developers, that's hundreds of thousands of people who might have something valuable to say but can't say it. How many bugs went unreported? How many insights went unshared? How many potential contributors closed the browser tab because the social barrier was too high?
AI lowers that barrier. Not to zero - I still had to deal with being questioned about it today, and that still cost me. But low enough that I could get over it. Low enough that four bug reports got filed, three engine teams are now looking at a real issue, and the web might get a little better because of it.
A Request
If you maintain a project, a standards body, a community - think about your AI policies through an accessibility lens. Not everyone who uses AI to communicate is lazy, or hiding something, or trying to spam you. Some of them are fighting just to be in the room.
You wouldn't ask a marathon runner about their prosthetic leg mid-race. Don't ask me about my AI mid-bug-report.
My name is Todd Tanner. I'm @LostBeard on GitHub. I live in Ithaca, NY. I build open source GPU compute libraries for .NET and WebAssembly. I have social anxiety and I use AI to help me talk to people. I have nothing to hide. I just have trouble saying it without help.
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