The Hand and the Track: Posthuman Authorship in AI-Assisted Creation
February 2026I remember slot cars from childhood: the plastic track clicking together, hand on the lever, waiting. The car was beautiful, detailed, impossibly small. But motionless, it wasn't really a car. It only became a car when electricity flowed, when my hand pushed, when the track held it in the groove. Which one was moving? All of them. None of them alone.
Twenty years later, at three in the morning, I'm having the same existential crisis with a GitHub page. Another error message. Another prompt to Claude: "Create a responsive grid layout with light and dark mode toggle." Wrong. I correct it. Claude tries again. Better, but now the toggle doesn't work. "The JavaScript is missing the event listener."
Somewhere in this exhausting back-and-forth, something resembling a website emerges. I can't tell anymore where my intention ends and the system's output begins. This is either collaboration or I'm being gaslit by my own tools. Possibly both.
N. Katherine Hayles argues that the posthuman doesn't mean the end of humanity, but "the end of a certain conception of the human" (1999, p. 286). Which sounds ominous until you realize humans have always thought with tools, not just through them. I don't code through Claude. I code with it. My knowledge exists partially in my head, partially in Claude's training data, partially in the increasingly passive-aggressive error messages from GitHub. The boundary between my intelligence and artificial intelligence dissolves not because AI has become human, but because human thinking was always a distributed mess anyway.
Without Claude, I wouldn't be building this page at all. I'd be doing one of the other seventeen things on my list: programming a Twine game for Pride, writing microfiction, figuring out why Canva keeps crashing. The tool doesn't just assist my work. It creates a new kind of worker. Prompt engineer. Error translator. Unpaid therapist to a language model that keeps insisting it knows what I want better than I do.
Who built this website? Me? Claude? The collective trauma of Stack Overflow? Yes.
Karen Barad writes that things don't exist independently before they interact. Instead, they emerge through "specific intra-actions" (2007, p. 140). Which is a very academic way of saying: nothing exists in isolation, everything is tangled with everything else, good luck figuring out where you end and the world begins. I don't use Claude as a tool. I become-with it, to borrow Donna Haraway's delightfully weird phrasing (2016). The portfolio page emerges from an entire apparatus: my intention, my knowledge, my increasingly desperate prompts, Claude's training data, GitHub's constraints, the crushing awareness that I should be working on that Twine game instead.
All of it intra-acting. I've lost control entirely. Or perhaps control was never mine to begin with, which is either liberating or terrifying depending on how much coffee I've had.
But here's the thing: the tracks aren't neutral. Every correction I make, every prompt I refine, every 3 AM debugging session, this is labor. Free labor. The system learns from my frustration. It improves from my corrections. My unpaid problem-solving becomes training data for the next person's slightly less painful experience.
Am I building the website or am I building the infrastructure that builds websites? Am I running on the tracks or laying them down as I go?
If agency is distributed across human and non-human actors, what happens to accountability? This is where posthuman theory gets slippery. It's all entangled, nobody's in charge, systems emerge from relations, very philosophical, very elegant. Until something breaks. Then suddenly everyone wants to know whose fault it is.
Hayles saw this coming. While she argues "we have always been posthuman" because human thought has always depended on external technologies, she also insists that "embodiment can never be remediated" (1999, p. 291). I am not replaceable by Claude, no matter how much it wants to finish my sentences. My embodied experience, my knowledge of what actually works versus what looks good in theory, my ability to recognize when code will fail three steps from now, these cannot be distributed into the training data.
I know things Claude doesn't know. And Claude knows things I'll never know. And neither of us can do this alone, which would be touching if it weren't also a little concerning.
Agency might be distributed. But responsibility cannot be.
Donald Norman's concept of affordances helps here. Affordances are the action possibilities that objects offer (1988). A button affords pressing. A door handle affords pulling. An AI code assistant affords generating plausible-looking code very quickly and also affords making you feel slightly stupid when you can't figure out why that code doesn't actually work.
When Claude's interface makes certain approaches easy and others difficult, when the system expects specific prompt structures, when error messages guide me toward particular solutions, these aren't neutral features. They're designed constraints. The tool doesn't just help me code. It trains me to code in specific ways, to think in patterns that align with its training, to ask questions in formats it recognizes.
I'm learning to speak Claude. But what language am I forgetting?
I return to the slot car. Motion only exists when everything moves together: hand, electricity, track, car. This sounds poetic until you realize it means you can't move without infrastructure's permission. The posthuman condition means recognizing we're always coupled with our technologies. But coupling doesn't mean equality. It doesn't erase power.
Who built the tracks? Who controls the electricity? Who profits from my 3 AM debugging sessions?
I can't separate myself from my tools anymore. The portfolio page emerges from working with AI. But I'm also the person who remembers when these tracks didn't exist. Who knows other ways to move. Who can refuse to push the lever, even at 3 AM when it would be easier to let the system generate whatever it wants.
The car only exists in motion. But I'm learning to feel the difference between movement and being moved.
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Norman, D. A. (1988). The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.