is the intelligence in the room with us?

AI is the tech elephant that won't leave the room. It's a two letter acronym that I hear roughly 200 times a day. News articles, my own work, YouTube videos, even stressed out parenting questions all come back to AI.

My feelings on it have changed a good bit since the early 2020s when everyone was asking ChatGPT how many "R"s are in the word strawberry. It felt like the next tech wave to rise and crash. Just like NFTs before and augmented reality before that.

AI has proven to be useful for me in a few ways, though I still feel wrong for using it. Aside from the obvious environmental and intellectual property theft issues, it just feels so lazy. It can enable so much without requiring me to learn a new skill. I can pretend to be an artist, a musician, or a master writer in about 15 seconds. That sucks.

The parts of my job that I used to take the most pride in are now mostly automated. Writing code by hand is slower than promoting Claude Code. I can no longer take pride in a strong reactor or my test suite coverage. But I can still shine in different aspects of building software systems. I still get to solve problems.

I've returned to building side projects. The time to write code and refactor until my project feels like it's working has reduced significantly. I'm able to be creative and have fun. I get to use new tools and learn new languages all while building a thing that is useful (or at the very least, funny).

The framework for this blog site was vibe coded in a few hours. I knew how I wanted to write posts and serve them. Claude took my needs and made them a single install script to deploy it out.

That's not to say that I'm going to start grifting on LinkedIn or announcing the end of computer based jobs. There's still a human element that will always be needed. I'm not self hosting software that I don't understand, that would be insecure and irresponsible.

There are many parts of my life that I will always keep analog. For one, I'm never putting AI content into my blog posts. I've considered turning off spell check just to keep my human mistakes alive and well here. You get a straight dose of my bad grammar and issues with mixing past and present tense.

I don't care. At least it's real.