I’ve been playing with AI tools since January 2023 so about two months after ChatGPT landed and broke everyone’s brain. While I can’t claim I was there at the very start, I was definitely early enough to have felt the ground shift repeatedly under my feet since then.
I’ve felt the exhilaration of seeing a language model answer questions and flirt with reasoning, just as I felt the disappointment of realizing it was only predicting the next word with uncanny accuracy. The ups and downs of generating images when models were still finding their footing. Reading on about the ethics of it all, unsure whether to feel excited or unsettled, usually both at once.
Here’s the thing about following AI right now: there’s always something new to learn, and last month’s breakthrough is already assumed knowledge for some but will remain new for most. Under those circumstances, it’s easy to feel like you’re behind and the fact it moves fast in a way that makes it hard to hold onto what you’ve actually figured out. You spend so much energy keeping up that you rarely stop to notice how far you’ve come, how much you’ve learned and how much you may very well have to share.
That’s the first reason I’m writing this. Not to have answers, but to have a record of the questions I asked myself. A place to document what I’m experimenting with, what surprises me, what turns out to be noise and what ends up working at least for a time. The journey is worth tracking, especially when the destination keeps moving.
The second reason is simpler: I’ve been meaning to start writing again for years. AI gave me enough material to finally stop procrastinating, and more than that, it did the heavy lifting.
Three days ago I had no clue what Hugo was, Claude recommended it. I was aware Cloudflare had multiple services, but I did not know I could host a static blog there, published by a simple git push. Within 40 minutes, I had a local setup and a pipeline to publish online to my own domain. Claude did most of the work, I supervised and configured the tools. At some point, I also had to correct it because while AI is nice, it gets confused easily when UIs change. Bridging the gap between what they know, or used to know, and what you see is still a speed bump.
So, here we are: me writing on a Claude-suggested tool, published on a Claude-suggested host, using a Claude-suggested publishing pipeline, and you reading a text written by me from a draft written by Claude, based on a prompt by me.
Will you get value ouf of this or anything else I write? I hope so but I won’t guarantee it. If you do however, like and share as they say or just hit me up if you want to have a chat. Until then, keep being curious.