Nothing on this site or anything written in my voice on the internet was generated by AI. I treasure writing and the internet for thinking, self-expression, and connection with other humans. I am committed to using my own voice when writing anywhere on the internet and don't foresee that changing in the future.
Here's how I do use AI:
gpt-4o-mini
to claude-3.5-sonnet
at the suggestion of a few coders I respect, to great effect so far. I also started tinkering with a .cursorrules
config file (docs) which has improved output. I've found that Cursor: (1) helps me focus more deeply on valuable work and less on bikesheddy technical wormholes, (2) reduces my hesitance to dive into new languages, packages, frameworks, etc., (3) dramatically mitigates the grindy parts of coding, and (4) increases my happiness. For reasons that feel obvious to me, I heavily revise and repurpose AI-generated code to make it more readable, maintainable, and generally fit into whatever I'm working on. In short, while AI helps me write code, I take responsibility for molding it into something that's useful in the real world and high quality for my fellow nerds.Finally, one contrarian AI take I have is that "hallucinations" are immensely helpful. They heighten my diligence, force me to be truly engaged with whatever I'm working on, and, ultimately, reveal tons of insights. I think the key is acknowledging that I'm working with a pattern matching algorithm and not actual "intelligence."