AI and My Writing

I am a very bad writer. It is one of my greatest weaknesses. I find it extremely difficult to articulate the thoughts that are running through my head. Words seem to flee from my mind as I write. As I craft sentences, my brain becomes increasingly sluggish and I second guess the next word that is going to make up the sentence (I literally re-wrote this sentence 4 times because I didn't know where I was going with it).

It is for this reason that I choose to not use AI in my writing - or almost any part of the process. I want my writing to be authentic and to accentuate what goes through my head. I even want those typos to exist, those run-on sentences, the confusion that might be the end result. It is this authenticity that I appreciate in other's writings.

Not everything needs to be professional. Not everything needs to be augmented. Sometimes, we can just be genuine and allow for the flaws of that sincerity to simply exist.

AI and My Work

I very much enjoy the process of prototyping a concept I have in mind with agentic coding. I find myself frequently thinking about the scene in Iron Man where Tony Stark is in his garage speaking commands to J.A.R.V.I.S. as he engineers the Iron Man suit. It feels cool to think through how I want to approach a problem and design the solution for it; and I greatly appreciate the freedom of not having to worry about the syntax of the code while I think through the problem statement and architectural design of the solution. Heck, and sometimes the end result of the agentic session is even great! And you can just roll it into the codebase.

Now, I am a realist. AI is simply a tool. And strangley, it's an amorphous tool. Normally, you can look at a tool and know immediately what it will be good at. Take a miter saw, for example. You take one look at that thing and you immediatly know that it will cut the crap out of wood. Unfortunately for AI, there is nothing deterministic about it. Until you make that prompt, you cannot know whether the result will be what you want it to be.

I recently read an article by Mo titled There is no skill in AI coding that articulated how I think about the state agentic coding. In this article, Mo essentially rewrites a post made by the godfather of agentic coding, Andrej Karpathy, where Mo rephrased the state of AI coding as if it were a post about a specific engineer. He describes the goods and the bads and addresses the constant gaslighting of the CEOs and investors of these AI companies in a pretty humorous way.

The take away that I had from that article is that a tool - which AI is - should be learned and evaluated for what it is good at, and then it should be used for those situations.

AI is simply another tool. I am the wielder of that tool.

If you're interested in the tools that I use in my daily software development process, you can check out my Software and Environment section of my Office Setup article.

General Curiosity

It's odd that we live in a world that a singular topic, a singular acronym, has so much taken over our lives. It lives on the tip of every individual's tongue. It is the lifeblood of companies and organizations. It is the sole industry keeping the GDP growing within the United States over the last year or two.

AI is exciting. AI is scary. AI is magic. AI is stupid. AI is a "yes, man".

Everybody is an expert. Nobody understands.

The paradox that is "AI" is crazy!

The communication around AI is almost as polarizing as politics or religion.

How do we normalize AI to being simply a thing that exists, a tool to be used and get past some of these sentiments?

If you haven't noticed, there is no real point or structure to this block. They're simply thoughts and statements I have had as I wrote this post.