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