I’ve had “AI usage statements” in the back of my mind ever since I read Ethan Marcott’s blog post sharing a round-up of his favorite ones. I didn’t consider writing one for this site, since it had the smell of status-signaling. Like a quasi-political declaration of allegiance to some sort of in-group (be it pro-AI, anti-AI, etc). I couldn’t be less interested in that.1 But then something happened that caught me completely off-guard. I was reading a post on my friend’s personal blog. This was a guy that I knew personally and looked up to. I’ve been reading everything he had been writing for years. About two-thirds of the way through a long (and fairly insightful) blog post, I had a sudden realization that the post had been written by AI. I’m not the best at detecting this kind of thing, but once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It was unmistakable. And the thing is, I didn’t feel indifferent or even disappointed, as I might have predicted. I felt betrayed. For somebody who considers themselves open-minded—even optimistic—towards the development of AI, I didn’t know where this feeling was coming from. I have theories… maybe it has something to do with the social contract between the writer and the reader. Whatever it is, I didn’t want anyone who was reading my blog (hi mom 👋) to feel the same thing. So for the sake of transparency, here is my AI usage statement: The content of this website is written by me. I do not use AI to generate the text you are reading because writing from scratch helps me process my thoughts (which is one of the main reasons I blog in the first place). I don’t currently use AI-powered writing tools (grammar-check, spell-check, dictation tools, etc), but I may experiment with them as long as they don’t undermine the thinking process. The code for this website was originally hand-written, but I have since used AI to make several useful updates. I expect to continue using AI to write code for this website and other personal coding projects. When I create a public project exclusively with AI, I mention that fact in the project README.2 I am experimenting and my AI usage may change. When it does, I’ll update the policy here on my /about page, which is where it will live long-term. To explain why, see Paul Graham's Keep your Identity Small. ↩ For an example, see s-tier ↩ Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on the original post or sending me an email.

In October, a new movie will be released based on one of my favorite books, Klara and the Sun. This has happened a lot for me recently (see The Three Body Problem, The Martian, Project Hail Mary, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow). I know it’s cliché to say that the book is better, but that has generally been my experience. The Martian was groundbreaking but when you force it into a 2-hour format for general consumption it becomes a forgettable action movie. The Klara trailer doesn’t give me much hope. The cheery, jokey vibe, feels nothing like the experience I had reading the book, so I wanted to take this opportunity to share what made it special to me. Note: I wrote a succinct, spoiler-free review back in 2024, so if you want the basics, I invite you to read that. For everybody else, let’s continue. Klara is an advanced humanoid robot—an Artificial Friend (“AF”)—who was designed to be a companion for children. We follow along as Klara is purchased from her store, meets Josie, her child, and assists Josie’s family as they navigate the challenges of their world. The story is told from Klara’s perspective, allowing the reader to see what she sees and feels. As a new robot, Klara is somewhat like a child, trying to piece together an understanding of the world, and the reader is brought along on that journey. We know from the beginning that Josie’s life is complicated and that there’s something unhealthy about her or her family, but neither we nor Klara understand what or why. The process of discovering what’s actually happening made the book very interesting. As an AI, Klara sees things differently than humans see things. She often focuses on things that a human would dismiss and breezes over things a human would care about. She also sees the world with fresh eyes, which allows her to make observations I wouldn’t have considered. For example, she notices that humans go to great lengths to avoid loneliness. This fear of loneliness, she observes, is at the root of nearly all human decisions (a surprising insight that I would never have considered). At the same time, Klara is naive. At times, I found myself wondering if I could trust her observations and conclusions. One of the themes that emerges throughout the story is the question of whether humans are replaceable. The robots in the story are different from humans, but they’re clearly intelligent and capable of doing human work. Klara often expresses simple emotions like joy and fear, which help her care for Josie. The humans caring for Josie, have greater emotional range, but it’s almost a liability. The mother’s grief over her other daughter’s death has left emotional scars, and her neighbor’s guilt has left her incapacitated in many ways. The humans are trying to hold it together, but they’re clearly volatile while Klara is endlessly patient, optimistic, and kind. I was originally turned off by Klara’s obsession with the sun. She gets this idea in her mind that somehow the sun could help heal Josie from her sickness, and it was obvious to me that Klara was confused. I knew that the sun was a distant ball of gas, but to Klara, a solar-powered robot, it was a magical source of life and rejuvenation. I became certain that her programming as a robot (and her early formative experiences in the store), were throwing off her judgement. Clearly, she was blinded by what she was, and thus wasn’t able to see that her side-quests would have no effect and waste precious time. But I was wrong. The sun healed Josie, not because it was an anthropomorphic life-giver that took pity on Josie, or respected Klara’s sacrifice. It healed Josie because it gave everyone hope. It gave them hope at their lowest moments, when they were willing to throw away logic, and try anything if it might help her get better. To Klara, the sun was God. It was her distant life giver and the provider of miracles. That’s why Klara didn’t want to tell the humans all the details of her plan. She knew there needed to be space for all of them to have faith. This storyline about the sun impacted me because it was basically a speedrun of the religious-skepticism journey we often experience in the real world. We care so much about our worldview being evidence-based that we fail to realize that there are some things that evidence cannot give us. Things like hope, meaning, purpose, and a reason to act selflessly. The sun also brings back the fundamental question. If a robot can heal a child by exercising faith in God and risking her life to save the ones she loves, then how can there be anything left that’s special about humans? Are the humans not doomed to obsolesce? Online reviews for Klara and the Sun call it a “dystopian novel,” but I found the story quite hopeful. Human gene-editing, advanced artificial intelligence, and the obsolescence of humans are difficult topics to grapple with, but that world is coming fast. Some parts are already here. This story paints a picture of people finding a way to navigate it. Some people embrace the future (often paying heavy costs), some run from it, some fight it, and others accept it. But they all find a way. You and I get to decide how we respond to our own changing world, but if I can take one lesson from Klara it would be to keep an open mind. We become so certain of what we know that we forget to leave space for what we don’t. Curiosity is a gift. If we allow it to fade as we mature, we lose the opportunity to see things that could change our lives for the better. Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on the original post or sending me an email.

“You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns.” I love this quote from James Clear because it hurts me in all the right ways. At my worst, I feel like my daily patterns are at war with my grand plans. When I’m fighting a daily battle and willpower is slipping, I need every reminder that this moment, right now, is critical. Because it is! Your body is the result of your daily food and exercise choices, not your healthy ambitions. Your mind is the result of your regular media choices, education environment, and adjacent relationships, not an independent observer, hovering uninfluenced above your day-to-day interactions. Your character is the result of your actual sacrifices—for others, for your integrity, and for the common good—not your generous aspirations. When I’m struggling with daily patterns, it’s helpful for me to look at the times I was rocking it. I’ve had periods of my life when my workouts were really consistant, or I journaled every day, or I always woke up early. What contributed to those things? Often, it was social pressure, an accountability buddy, or a change of environment that pushed me into a productive place (underrated benefit of having a blog: it’s a historical record of your successes and failures). Of all the things I might learn looking back at these experiences, perhaps the most important is that it’s never been easy. I’ve got 15+ years of posts documenting the battle. Sometimes I’m winning and sometimes I’m losing, but I’m always fighting, and that’s a daily pattern too. Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on the original post or sending me an email.

Over the last four months I’ve increased my use of AI for web dev work pretty dramatically. I use it every day at work, as do most of my coworkers. I don’t think it’s disputed anymore that AI-assisted development can save a lot of time and effort. The question is, what do we do with all that surplus? The standard narrative in the industry is to use it to go faster. Ship three features a day instead of one. Get a half-dozen agents working in parallel. 10x your productivity. If you don’t move fast, your competitors will! I get it. Speed is good and it has benefits beyond just finishing more stuff per unit time. Speed matters! But we live in an era of extreme consumer choice, especially in the world of software. Even pre-AI, there were dozens of good email clients, to-do lists, fitness apps, and analytics tools, all chock-full of useful features at reasonable prices. What is “going faster” going to give us? Even more options, with even more features? Apparently yes. In the past quarter, iOS app store submissions have risen by 84 percent, and Hackernews, “ShowHN” submissions have nearly tripled. We live in an era of software abundance. But as software grows increasingly abundant, attention grows increasingly scarce. Attention was scarce even before AI but it’s going to get worse. Consumers have more choices than ever, and increasingly those choices are becoming undifferentiated as the industry uses AI to produce them. What if we did the opposite? Instead of using your AI surplus to go faster, what if you used it to go deeper? What if, instead of building ten good features, you built two amazing ones? What if, instead of blasting out a dozen landing pages, you poured your attention and care into a home page that knocked someones socks off—one that could not have been built by an AI, because nothing like it could have been found in the training data? What if you doubled-down on performance? On accessibility? On user-experience? On creating a strong personal touch? It would stand out! That matters, arguably, even more than speed. Striking a balance The more I thought about this, the more I recognized it as the same ol’ quality vs quantity debate, where it pays to strike a balance: If we pour all our surplus time into quality, we end up hurting quality by failing to iterate. If we pour all our surplus time into quantity, we end up hurting speed as tech debt accumulates1. But what’s the ideal balance? Is it 90% quality, 10% speed? 50% - 50%? How would you spend your AI surplus? Remember: Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. ↩ Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on the original post or sending me an email.