/ai

A brief overview of my personal philosophy and use of AI tooling

Pandora’s Box

One of the hardest truths to swallow about AI is that it is indeed a Pandora’s Box, and all the terrible monsters are not going back in. This means we have a choice: yell at the sky, or adapt and overcome. In the context of survival, I choose the latter.

A Vehicle

A tool is a vehicle. It can take you places, but it can’t replace the act of going. Take photography for example. An expensive and capable camera can really do wonders in the hands of a skilled photographer, but probably not as much in the hands of a beginner. The camera does not make the photographer; it is a vehicle to do something the creator can do with most other vehicles. Too many people think if their cousin has a nice camera then they can shoot their wedding, and that’s just not the case. There is experience, thought, and care that goes into work like this.

In many ways I see AI tooling working the same. When writing code, AI assisted coding is much more useful in the hands of an experienced engineer that knows how something is supposed to be built. They can give specific instructions, know what security holes to check, and how to refine code to make it more efficient. A less experienced person will use AI tools to make something without any deep knowledge of how it’s supposed to work, and once they hit bugs from decisions made by the LLM that they don’t understand, the quality will decay.

This is a guiding principle as I use AI tools, and I try to recognize when I need to do the hard work of gaining experience instead of leaving it to the LLM.

Writing

I firmly believe that writing is crucial to the human experience and for processing knowledge and logic, and for that reason I do not offload any of my writing to an LLM. In some cases I might ask an LLM to review writing for spelling or grammar mistakes, but I do not let it sway or influence my logic or thinking when writing the content itself.

Creative Work

Similar to writing, I find the act of creating art to be the main reason for it existing. Therefore it does not make much sense to have an LLM do something that is purely meant to benefit the creator (a great presentation on that here). That said I do not use AI to create images, videos, audio, or any artistic endeavor that is better carried out by humans.

I should clarify that there is a big difference between using AI to make an image, vs using AI to help an artist make a website to host their art. For most artists, there is no personal gain in writing HTML CSS and JS. It’s just a tool to help deliver the art. Again, I say most because there are plenty of people who are programming artists. It really just depends.

General Knowledge

Whenever I want to learn about something or find information, I default to using Kagi to do a classic web search. This is just a part of the classic web I want to hold onto as much as I can. It’s important to visit sites by real people. However there are cases where finding information on a subject is incredibly difficult, and in those I will ask an LLM to see if they have better info.

Programming

Due to my career there is a certain pressure to keep up with the latest AI tooling, so I do my best to learn and optimize as much as I can. Tools like Claude are incredibly powerful and can do quite a bit, but they are not complete on their own. As mentioned in the beginning, a tool is only as good as the one who wields it. For most programming tasks Claude is simply writing code that I already know how to write. The problem is already solved, I just need it implemented.

With that said, even in those cases a programmer can become dull. For this reason I try to set aside spare time to work on a hard project writing code by hand with no AI assistance. These sessions are hard, but the gains are worth it.