I came to dev.to to translate. I stayed to steal.
I mean that as the compliment it is here. On this site, "I'm stealing that line" is something you say to an author's face and they thank you for it. Ideas are meant to be lifted, reused, carried home. It took me a while to understand that culture — because I didn't arrive as a thief. I arrived as a tourist who couldn't read the signs.
Here's the setup. I'm Korean. My English is workable but slow, and writing a comment good enough to earn a real reply from a stranger — in a second language, in a technical field I never trained in — is more than I can do alone at a speed I'd tolerate. So when I started reading and commenting here, I opened an AI beside me and used it the obvious way: as a translator. Read the post, get the gist, draft a reply, fix my English, post it.
That was the whole plan. It lasted about a week.
The moment the tool changed jobs
