AI

This page contains my thoughts on using generative AI & LLMs for my personal work and blogging. I want to start with an obligatory disclaimer: none of these views represent the views of my employer or indicate anything about my use of AI professionally. With that out of the way, I want to write a bit about how I do and don’t use AI in my personal work and in particular on this site. Now, let’s get into it:

  • To start with, not a single line of prose on this site was written using AI and as of now, I don’t ever intend to publish any AI-written content. I feel like I need to start with this because AI-generated content seems to provoke the most passionate feelings on either side of the AI “debate” that seems to be well underway in the replies section to every Tweet/Toot/post about AI. I’m personally not a fan of AI-generated content (be it writing, music, visual art, etc.) and I don’t ever intend to use any on my site. I think personal websites are fantastic vehicles for people to publish their own thoughts and I think about AI-generated content here in a similar way to how I think about plagarism. It wouldn’t make any sense for me to plagarize someone else’s writing on my blog because I’m making this blog for me and not to prove anything to anyone or to make money. In a similar sense, it wouldn’t make any sense for me to publish AI-written prose here because it fundamentally isn’t my writing and I don’t think it benefits me or my readers to publish anything that someone or something else wrote.
  • While the content on the site wasn’t made with AI, some of the code powering the site was. The fundamental layout and design and typography and color choices are all mine. The layout of the code structure itself is mine. The choice of frameworks and tools is all mine as well. There are a few parts of the site’s code that it made sense to outsource to an AI coding assistant. For instance, the wavy/blobby lines used as visual diviers on the site are made using <SVG> files. Some people may be able to hand-write SVGs but I cannot and it made the most sense to me to describe what I was going for to Claude1 and have it generate the SVGs over the course of a few back-and-forth requests. Similarly, some of the more boilerplate sections of HTML markup were also generated by Cursor’s “tab” feature2.
  • In my day job as a software engineer, I do use AI somewhat regularly for pair programming and helping me refine technical ideas, such as implementation plans for complex UI features. At the end of the day I am still responsible for all the code I ship, and I am not in the habit of pure “vibe coding” and letting the AI run wild, but I do find it surprisingly useful for a lot of the more rote/boilerplate parts of the job. I am baffled by people who still insist that everything generated by AI sucks and is bad, because that pretty objectively is not true if you spend even a little bit of time using it as a partner in doing serious work.
  • In my personal life, I don’t use AI a ton but I do use it somewhat regularly (maybe once every other day or so). I find it perfect for answering random trivia questions that pop up in day-to-day conversations3 or for helping me talk through confusing or complicated situations in my life.

First published on June 7, 2025

Footnotes

  1. Claude is one of the many AI models available in apps like Cursor. It is similar to something like ChatGPT, just made by a different lab and with different strengths and weaknesses ↩

  2. For the uninitiated, tab mode in Cursor (or similar apps like Microsoft Copilot) is basically like a very elaborate version of the auto-complete suggestions you get when writing text messages. Instead of suggesting the next word, however, it suggests lines of code as you’re typing. It isn’t perfect but it is generally surprisingly good in my experience and helps me save a lot of time ↩

  3. As a perfect example…a friend texted me once about how into Korean sweet potatoes he was. I thought he was talking about a recipe, not a type of potato. Once he clarified, I asked if they were anything like Japanese sweet potatoes. He had never heard of those, and I had never heard of Korean ones. I Googled a few permutations of “Korean sweet potato” or “Korean vs. Japanese sweet potatoes” and got a whole bunch of recipe websites but nothing about what the two types of potato actually were. I asked ChatGPT and it was pretty instantly able to tell me that they are in fact slightly different varieties of sweet potato but that supermarkets in western countries often use the terms interchangably, which explains how I had never heard of Korean ones and my friend had never heard of Japanese ones. ↩

What is this?

The /ai page is meant to be an encapsulation of the author's thoughts on using AI for their website and also in general. It was inspired by Damola Morenikeji's /ai page , and also this list of various sites with their own /ai pages .