tl;dr - AI helps me get the nonsense out of the way so I can focus on being creative and I think that might be where it belongs in my workflow.
There’s a lot of hype around AI these days, and a lot of concern has come along with it. Most of it’s pretty warranted. There are things that AI is doing or can do that’s pretty messed up and terrifying. I get the concern and I’m well aware of all the challenges we face, but the key to the whole thing is that it’s not going anywhere. If we’re going to ignore it, we’re going to get left behind. Maybe that’s what some folks want, and that’s okay, but I think it’s worth looking at it logically. There’s some guy that I’m sure insisted the automobile was never going to take off so he went broke making buggy parts. Someone got angry that people were able to use google and find all the information that they once had to study at the library. Even more recently, someone is angry that YouTube has made it possible to learn anything you want from any number of unreliable sources. Artificial Intelligence is just another tool in the toolbox that someone will embrace and someone else will say makes everything too easy.
I say all that because I think it’s important that I preface my thoughts about. AI’s ability to hurt people is incredibly high. People can lose jobs, people are going to see horrible things posted that look real but are not, and in the worst case, people could be irreversably traumatized by it. It really terrifies me. That being said, if I dig my heals in and choose not to use it, it’s not going to change any of that. So why not try to do something good or decent with it. That and I work for a company that is retooling everything to becoming a player in the AI space, mostly in the name of making sure that there is an Open Source footprint where it’s not made or trained in the shadows.
So here’s where I’m going with all this. I have been able to accomplish a ton of incredibly useful stuff by getting help from AI. The projects I’ve been working on are mostly not things that I would have really tried without having an AI tool to work on it with. It wasn’t perfect, but it did a good job helping me get out of my own way, and make some stuff that helped me in my daily tasks. I made a Big Dumb Toolbox that has all kinds of neat things in it and it was all done with AIs help. I had to look after a bit while it worked, but I got a handful of nifty tools out of that thing. That experiment opened my eyes to possibilities, but it didn’t solidify any kind of frequent usage.
Then I ran into a major problem with a Java application that I had no idea how to do debug. I was made responsible for it a few weeks ago even though I have no java experience and for the most part that wouldn’t be required. Then some gnarly thing started to happend and I had to figure it out. It would have taken me days and I’m not sure what route I would have gone to to get to the answer. There was a customer having a problem and I really didn’t have that kind of time. So I went to an approved AI tool to see if it could help. I passed it the file where I thought the problem was based on some early debugging, and I fed it the error message. I let the system to get to work, and it turned out that I was definitely correct at where the problem was, and it told me exactly how to fix it. The logic all made sense to me, I reviewed it and got it peer reviewed, we implemented the change and we’re back in business. All in less than an HOUR. I looked into it a bit, asked AI for help, and it helped. Very impressive.
A new thing I decided I needed was to update the theme to this very blog. I love using Hugo but sometimes the themes that are created are not super easy to customize and get to working. So I decided to get AI to help me get all the files where they needed to go so I could do the work. If you’re just getting to this part, then this is my point. I needed to use AI to get the stupid stuff out of the way so I could be creative. I used it to make the theme look right for me, not in style but in the way it lays out the files so they get displayed properly. Once I had all that set, I could write. I’m writing this now after getting to make it simple for me to write new stuff. AI has not helped me write this post, and I figure that’s probably obvious. I haven’t used it for any creative endeavor, but I have used it to get the boilerplate stuff out of the way for me to do more creative work.
I feel like that’s a compromise that I could make. Adding guardrails around my AI use so that I don’t lose my creative edge. I want to be able to use all the tools available to me, and AI is making it so that I can do that where I can put my heart into something and not get held back by technical nonsense. I’ve literally gone back and forth to certain themes for months to try to make things work for me and I generally don’t have the time and even when I did, I would get lost in it. AI helped me get it right in less than an hour. I’m now writing. I’m not programming, or trying to figure out a bug in a them. I’m writing. I’m doing the job I want to do and not being held back by nonsense.
I think there’s some good uses for it, but I think like anything else it’s worth being guarded. Understand how it fits in your workflow. You can be angry, and you probably should be for a ton of the uses that you see out in the wild. But maybe it’s not all terrible on its face. A tool is a tool. It’s how we use it that makes a difference.