Image: UnsplashThis is a blog about software and my experience in the software industry. And if I were the enterprising type, I’d feed a bunch of loose ideas into an LLM and have that bad boy slop out some content to publish here. Given half a Saturday, I am sure I could wire up a pipeline to auto-publish hundreds of articles to this domain. AI has even gotten pretty good at copying people’s writing styles, so I bet it could do a fairly convincing job sounding like me.
So why don’t I do that - am I in denial? Am I arrogantly holding onto the idea that human writing is somehow still intrinsically valuable? Do I do it for the love of the game? The answer to all these questions is: perhaps.
Now, I’m not some Luddite who has joined the growing anti-AI movement, though those people do have a few points, like NYC’s recent move to restrict AI in schools while kids’ brains develop a few more wrinkles. I certainly did not artisanally hand-code every single part of this website without touching AI. That would be an insane waste of time, akin to custom-writing all my imports in 2012 instead of letting my JetBrains IDE handle it.
I, like many software engineers these days, grow tired of seeing the fingerprints of AI everywhere. You can spot an AI-generated doc from a mile away. It’s long. It’s vague in all the wrong places. It doesn’t carry the voice of the person who supposedly wrote it. It’s inoffensive and bland to a fault. There’s no spice. You can’t connect with the actual lived experience of the author.
It just kind of sucks, to be honest. The writing is just bad.
I’ve seen plenty of specs and design docs in my day job that were unashamedly written by an LLM. Someone asks, “Hey, can you read my strategy doc?” and Confluence informs you it’s a 38-minute read. It’s like, brother, I know you didn’t write that.
But perhaps more importantly, I know there are actual valuable, sharp thoughts in your noggin that need to get out. The problem is you’ve buried those thoughts under 34 minutes of fluff and noise in order to save yourself one hour of writing. And now you’ve pushed that signal-to-noise time burden onto all the readers. You shouldn’t do that to your coworkers, and I certainly don’t want to do it to my readers-all four of you.
So that’s what I’m trying to say. I don’t use AI to write because I want to give people a place to read, breathe, vent, and relate in an ever-expanding ocean of generic content. An oasis of humanity, of sorts. And one that isn’t trying to sell you anything.
We’re just vibing here, boys. (Not “vibe coding,” just regular vibing). Just here to chop it up.
P.S. Do I use AI as a copy-editor? You bet your ass I do. Apologies to the American Copy Editor’s Society. I cannot afford you.