Silence vs. Disclosure
Is staying quiet actually protecting anyone?
If you’ve just arrived here: the previous post in this sequence ended with a decision. I built a tool in an hour that could automate the work my old team does every day — and then I chose not to deploy it. Power isn’t about what you can do, I said. It’s about what you choose to do.
I believed that when I wrote it. I still mostly do.
But I’ve been sitting with a complication I didn’t name in that post, and it deserves its own space.
The choice I thought I’d made
Staying quiet felt like the ethical option. I wasn’t going to take a tool I’d built on my own time, on my own initiative, and use it to put people I genuinely care about out of work. That felt like a clear line. I drew it, stepped back, and told myself I’d done the right thing.
What I hadn’t fully reckoned with is this: staying quiet isn’t the same as making the problem go away.
It turns out I’m not alone in sitting on something like this. There’s a name for it now — the shadow AI economy: people quietly automating real parts of their own jobs using personal AI subscriptions, never telling their managers, every one of them carrying the same low hum of unease even though they hadn’t technically done anything wrong. I’m not an outlier. I’m a data point in a pattern that’s growing every week.
But There’s A Complication
Some experts argue that staying quiet isn’t actually the safe, ethical choice it feels like. It’s just a delay.
Organisations move in years. Individuals move in afternoons. That gap closes whether I open my mouth or not. And one piece of research put it in a way I haven’t been able to shake: the shadow building isn’t the problem, the gap that created it is — and companies that find out early treat it as a chance to finally build the thing properly, rather than a violation to suppress.
Which means my silence might not be protecting my old team at all. It might just mean I’m not the one who gets to shape what happens next, when someone with fewer scruples than me builds the same thing and doesn’t stop to ask the questions I stopped to ask.
The question I can’t fully answer
I’m not going to resolve this here. I’ve said that about a few posts in this sequence, and I mean it every time — some tensions don’t resolve, and pretending otherwise would be a different kind of dishonesty.
What I can say is this: the choice I made in Sandi’s Principles was real and I don’t regret making it. But it wasn’t the tidy ethical full stop I briefly mistook it for. It was a decision made under uncertainty, with incomplete information, in a landscape that’s changing faster than anyone’s policy documents.
The tool is still sitting on my hard drive. I still don’t know what I’ll do with it.
What I know now, that I didn’t quite know when I made the choice, is that the decision isn’t just mine to make indefinitely. The gap closes regardless. The only real question is who closes it, and on whose terms.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.