Tom MacWright on putting yourself out there and the fear of being found out for being imperfect:
putting your art, writing, expression out to be judged by others is an act of bravery as much as talent, and a lot of people lack bravery. Sorry to say it but if you need your work to be polished and beyond reproach, that’s a determination and character problem, not a skill problem.
Niklas Gruhn, on relaying AI output verbatim:
By all means, prompt AI. But don’t just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you’ve done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.
This reminds me of Simon Willison’s rule, I will not publish anything that takes someone else longer to read than it took me to write.
Among friends I’ll sometimes skip the rewrite and share a link with the prompt in it instead. As Dave Rupert mentioned, he wants the prompt because it shows the context you gave the machine and your understanding of the problem: I’d rather have the original prompt so I can just ask the machine myself.
It’s the least bad way to relay, not an alternative to doing the work.
At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.
The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work—if the task has to be done and no one cares how—then it’s fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and howthe task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn’t make sense to use AI.
Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture.
[…] The math only works if the LLM decreases your maintenance costs, and by exactly the inverse of the rate it adds code. If you double your output and your cost of maintaining that output, two times two means you’ve quadrupled your maintenance costs. If you double your output and hold your maintenance costs steady, two times one means you’ve still doubled your maintenance costs.
No matter how rapidly technology changes, I am coalescing around some core beliefs:
- Things that are worth doing are worth doing well.
- Things that are done well require time and effort.
- You make meaning through the doing.
- Ideas are common; effort is not.
- There are no shortcuts.
Just watched the latest Whiskey Web and Whatnot episode with Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert. No one would’ve guessed that I was watching a web dev podcast from how much I was laughing.
At one point in the episode Adam mentions, “holy crap, my job is now leftover tokens in a burn window”. If Adam can feel like AI is making his work redundant then what hope do I have? 🙈
- Good software depends on judgment, communication, and clear abstraction. AI has amplified this.
- AI coding is automation of implementation, so design and stewardship become more important.
When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling. Good, bad, neutral—whatever. Until I find out that it’s AI art. Then I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bit bored.
Jim Nielsen on the personal connections formed on the internet.
You could search the world and find someone who saw what you see, felt what you feel, went through what you’re going through.
And how these connections are increasingly being lost when we prompt an impersonal LLM instead.