Like many in the software development industry I have been on a journey to learn what there is to know about how AI can be applied to coding in a useful and realistic way, not pipe dreams and clout farming.
This blog is intended be a log of what I’m discovering, learning and experimenting about AI, both as a means of sharing what I’m doing and a personal record.
The ethos of this blog
Over the past few years I realised that I overwhelmingly prefer reading articles and blog posts written by humans. I’m not just talking about the writing style, the nature of how the articles are structured, or even the liberal use of em dashes. For me the point of reading someone’s blog is to understand how they think, what they think, and what’s important to them. Given this, it seems odd to read an article generated by a machine (I suppose there could be an argument for extremely technical step by step tutorial-esque articles but thats an argument for another day).
This is the core reason that I decided that this series of blog posts should be entirely "handwritten". The point of this blog is not to pump out mountains of SEO-optimised content. It is about sharing thoughts, experiences, ideas and experiments that I’ve had in a raw unadulterated manner. The other part, is that a blog focused primarily on AI, very explicitly written without the aid of AI, is an amusing proposition.
This blog is a personal record of what I’m learning and how I'm navigating this chaotic, sometimes unhinged AI development world.
What to expect
I’m not entirely sure what should be expected of this blog. I intend for this to be a reasonably unpolished record of what I find interesting and useful. All I know is that the writing you're reading, hasn't been written or edited with the help of AI.
Is that to say no AI at all has gone into the creation of this blog? No, there definitely are aspects of this blog that have been AI assisted, primarily when it came to creating the HTML and CSS template baseline. The primary goal is human writing, not an entire elimination of any AIusage.
A random side quest
In a moment of weakness I decided to follow in the footsteps of Ginger Bill and hand code a simple static site generator for this blog using Odin. Don’t bother asking why I chose to do this because I’m not entirely sure. But what I do know is I enjoyed doing it. I’m happy with the result and I learned something. Its pretty rough, and quite custom for this particular blog but it gave me a significant amount of enjoyment going back to pure hand coding. Expect to see a future blog post on my thoughts on handwriting code in this brave new world.