This blog is free from AI involvement in writing posts. I treat it as an outlet for things I ruminate on.
English is not my first language, that much is obvious. I am also well aware of the fact that my English writing skills have a lot of room for improvement. Nevertheless, I never ask generative AI to verify my writing, format it or whatnot. I try doing my best to at least be easy to understand, and I hope I’m doing a half decent job at achieving that goal. Seeing how ubiquitous genAI got these days, and how more and more concerns are being brought up regarding use of genAI in any form of creative work and adverse effects of overly relying on it for things we used to do ourselves, I strive to flex my brain instead of asking whatever LLM to do it for me.
When it comes to coding, I definitely don’t write all of my code by hand anymore. However, for day-to-day tasks at work, I am usually quicker to find whatever piece of code I need to modify and apply changes myself, rather than describing the problem to AI and letting it take the wheel. And whenever I’m learning new stuff - my recent foray into Kotlin Multiplatform for a work-related project is one example - I definitely take the slow approach of doing things by hand. This way I get to learn what goes where and if I get to use AI down the line, I’ll be prepared if it tries to bullshit its way around a tricky problem, and this happens to me quite often. My brain enjoying the stimulation of learning new stuff is an added benefit.
It sure feels like a superpower when you kick off an empty project, type a few sentences and AI whips out a working prototype. But a real superpower is being able to do it yourself, offline, with no help from any third party. Just you, a computer and some documentation on the side, if you need to refer to it at some point.
Try it, might turn out you enjoy it more than you think.