How I Use AI

536 words. Time to Read: About 5 minutes.

The short version: I don’t use AI at all for any of my writing. I do use it for some other things.

Background

I came across the concept of an “AI Manifesto” or “AI Usage Transparency” page in cassidoo’s newsletter. She mentions a post by Damola Morenikeji The basic idea is that, as AI gets more prevalent, it’s important that people are transparent about when and how they use AI so we can trust them when they say they’re not. I like that idea a lot. The rest of this page details my AI usage.

Coding

I do use AI to aid in my day-to-day job writing code and building software. Specifically, I use it in my editor, mostly via tab completion. I find the tab completion is usually quite good, it’s often pretty close to what I was going to type anyway, and it saves me some button pushing. Gemini, Claude, Copilot and a few others have actually been a delight to use, causing me to go, “Oh heck yeah” when they have a particularly good guess about what my intentions were.

So far, I haven’t found any models or settings that have been workable for using the agent/chat modes for code generation more than the smallest or most menial tasks. In general, I find that it tends to write mostly code that’s ok-ish with frequent junior-developer-like issues that I end up having to tweak, rewrite, or scrap altogether. Sometimes, I’ve found it to be plain wrong. And that’s frustrating. Additionally, the act of actually writing code is one of my favorite things about my job, and I pride myself on doing a good job at it. There (so far) hasn’t been a super compelling reason to lean on the chat agent more.

Learning

I do use AI to augment my quick searching and research. I use it for quick questions that I know there is a concrete answer for, and more vague questions like, “How does this look. Is it idiomatic Go (or whatever)?” The important bit is that I use it in situations where I already have a pretty good idea of the right answer and I can catch it if it’s way off. I don’t take its word for granted any more than I would a single Stackoverflow answer.

Writing

I don’t use AI to help me write. Ever. Every word on this blog or anywhere else you find my words is 100% my own words. I like that my writing has my voice in it. Manually writing things out helps me process ideas and learn. So, I don’t see any reason that I should let the robits sap the joy that the act of writing brings me.

Summarizing

I rarely use it for summarizing new things I’m learning about. I will never use it to summarize technical documents like research papers. If somebody wrote an article or paper about something, they (generally) used the amount of words they used because that’s how many words it took to teach the concepts right. Using AI to summarize only does myself a disservice in the long run and atrophies my “thinking about hard things” muscles.

Author: Ryan Palo | Tags: ai llms |

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