I guess I like AI now??

content/posts/ai-hestiation-turning-around.md

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+---
+date: 2025-01-28
+description: "I realized that I've been holding myself back because of pride."
+# image: ""
+lastmod: 2025-01-28
+showTableOfContents: true
+tags: ["AI", "Reflection"]
+title: "AI Hesitation Turning Around"
+type: "post"
+---
+
+
+# I'm a Bit of a Rebel
+
+I feel like some of what I do in life isn't because it's the "best". I certainly love optimizing workflows, switching
+keyboard layouts because QWERTY is clearly not the best, learning and customizing window managers instead of using broad
+defaults from full desktop environments. But, I also do lots of things that are decidedly not in pursuit of efficiency
+or optimization:
+
+- Firefox is not faster than Chrome, and AFAICT it still isn't really much better than Chromium
+privacy-wise
+- Linux causes me pain, MacOS supposedly "Just Works™"
+- NixOS causes me more pain, but I also love it
+- I daily drove a OnePlus 6 with [PostMarketOS](https://postmarketos.org/) for a few months last year. So cool to carry
+a terminal with you. But [Termux](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/) exists, and my wife could not reach
+me reliably.
+
+I don't value ease of use as much as other values like privacy, openness, and tinker-ability. As most
+things in life, it's always a trade-off. I get teased by many of my coworkers and friends for being the "linux guy" or
+similar, for choosing to swim upstream despite the more "obvious" easy choice of using the proprietary, super affordable
+electric boat (with better battery life BTW). So how could I come around to these over-hyped, shark-backed, environment
+burning GPU crunchers??
+
+# Just One More AI Bro
+
+I have seen it as a crutch. I see it as having very muddy licensing
+and potential legal issues in its future. I see it partly destroying the craft of software engineering. I think its
+very over hyped.
+
+_BUT_
+
+I think its time I give up fighting against the machine in this respect and see if using AI
+as a tool in my toolbelt helps me become a better engineer.
+
+## The Pivot Point
+
+I read [this blog post](https://blog.nelhage.com/post/personal-software-with-claude/) about building personal software
+with Claude and I realized that perhaps I could better my life and those around me by taking advantage of this tool. Was
+it just stubbornness and pride that was preventing me from benefitting? You may think its just FOMO, but I've held off
+for a long time from using AI.[^1] I think it is just a recognition of my hard-headed and misplaced judgement. So, today
+I am signing up for a Claude account. I'm going to build with AI (I'm not going to write these posts with it though). As
+this new perspective settled in my mind, I had a couple thoughts:
+
+## Using Non-Deterministic Tools
+
+One of the hardest challenges I think adopting AI use is due to its imprecise and ever-changing nature. Imagine using
+a compiler that failed to compile some C code, then when you just UP arrow and rerun `cmake` it works. No change in its
+input. In the world of software where precision, intent, and design matter, this feels like an Uno Reverse.  This is a
+tough tool to learn, depend, and rely on. A carpenter's ruler that moves its inch notches depending on the time of day??
+But, it's not just a ruler. It is so good at predicting tokens that it has some semblance of intelligence. So much so
+that many people, even those that know  intimately the internals of the technology, believe it is doing more than it is.
+
+## Is this like C?
+
+When the assemblers of the world got tired of porting their code to each new architecture and came up with C, was there
+a similar ripple in the software slinging community? Writing at such a high level will result in too many "head in the
+clouds" engineers. And perhaps, these new high-level developers will never even learn assembly! They will lose touch
+with the very systems that execute their code!! Unimaginable at the time, but certainly a reality we live in now. I have
+a few relatives entering the field and learning to code, and I don't imagine they will ever write assembly. I myself
+have written very little, and hardly think in assembly day-to-day.
+
+## Onwards into a Higher Future
+
+Not sure if it's a higher plane of Nirvana I am about to enter or if I'll be getting too close to the sun melting my
+waxed wings and plummet to my death, but I figure its never a bad idea to keep my mind open and give it a year.
+
+[^1]: Not entirely. My best guess is I've queried ChatGPT less than 50 times. I have used it over the last two years as a Google
+Search replacement occassionally. When AI was first released I tried it with some coding / reasoning tasks and formed
+most of my opinion from that experience.