Proving a Human Wrote Something

Summary

When drafting a new blog post after some years, it’s mandatory to begin it with some form of mea culpa. I actually made a New Year’s resolution to start writing more blog posts; after the dissolution of my company last year, my head was stuffed with all sorts of technical knowledge I needed to share (and which, I felt, the world needed to hear). I even put together a spreadsheet of possible ideas, which, as I’m writing this down now, I should probably revisit. Some combination of “I got lazy” or “I got busy” or “I didn’t think anyone would care” prevented me from writing, though. (That’s not to say I haven’t been writing anywhere else: I just got “How to Keep Well in Wartime” published, and I’m still running Inch Press!) I still also make endless side projects and maintain innumerable open source repos. To that end, I recently read something by Mitchell Hashimoto which began with this increasingly common disclaimer: this was completely hand-written with no AI assistance I’m not an AI-hater. I use it all day, every day, at my day job (and even wrote about on the company blog—more proof I still write!). I create shippable production code with it and experiments that never leave my terminal. I use it in my open source work to write commits, provide feedback, and generally automate tasks that are too convoluted to come up with in a bash or Ruby script. I don’t think any engineer can, or should, ignore AI. It’s a technology, and like all technologies, it’s here to stay (until something better comes along). It’s beneficial to the craft to understand how to work with it rather than spend time fighting against it. Part of the reason I enjoy programming is because I like solving technical puzzles. And, part of the reason I like AI is because I can say “do X using Y because of Z,” while walking away to go brew a third cup of coffee or pet my cat or do anything other than sit at my desk, tip-tapping the solution out. When I was a teenager, I, like Lain, never wanted to leave t...