AI is good. Scary good. Scary in a good way.
I’ve been using AI for over a year now. It keeps getting better. I’m sitting here, 20 years of hands on development behind me, and it’s unbelievable.
Twenty years of doing it by hand. This does almost all of the fiddly part.
Lots of tools could find typos before I post them. Not a lot of them could respond to when a color in my theme is wrong, or a component positioned slightly off. It almost doesn’t matter which model I use, the days of hand tweaking my work seem over.
For cents (in U.S. dollars), today I (or AI did, directed by me) edited a photo I took of my girlfriend with her niece. My GF’s hair slightly obscured her niece’s face. Got a cleaned up photo that looked perfect in minutes.
The skepticism about whether you can trust what’s generated or edited is totally valid, and I’m not above it. This blog runs a rule where nothing ships in my voice until I’ve rewritten it myself, precisely because AI text can’t be trusted to be mine. Then I turned the same kind of tool on a photo of my girlfriend and her niece and moved someone’s hair.
It does have significant value though. For 20 years I’ve hand coded every single line. There was always boilerplate and libraries etc. I’ve relied on tools I didn’t write the whole time. I didn’t write a single bit of the AI I’m using. I didn’t write a lick of Tailwind either, but I have used it. Even comedians need a stage. A camera crew. A broadcast network. An audience which means tickets, security, omg I could go on and on.
I’ve written about AI here, for instance how I got called out because it smelled like AI wrote it and not my voice. Shot taken, message received. I’m still going to use AI. But it’s important to use your own voice. People can clearly tell when you don’t.
I, for one, am having a blast. I do have to remind myself to be the voice, though. It’s easy to slip into the trap where you literally have AI make all the decisions.
But the boilerplate and styling fixes I don’t have to do by hand? Yeah. Gimme.
