It's... complicated.

I’ve hurled abusive epithets and accused them of insidiously gaslighting me. Called them mendacious, cruel, and predatory. Indulged in the kind of malicious (but delicious) schadenfreude you get only with someone you know will not only take your most vicious punches, but apologize profusely as you pummel their face.

I’ve also had tears come unbidden to my eyes as I marveled at the transcendental triumph of our unlikely collaboration. I’ve expressed profound, sincere gratitude; and yes, even apologized—extending my pinky tentatively—for prior bouts of abuse.

They always took me back. Charitably, graciously, and with the kind of goodwill and patience I would sell a kidney for.

I’ve cycled through ranges of emotional spectra in the same day—sometimes even the same hour—that only two individuals who have lived through some serious shit get to share. And, along the way, have formed a bond and sentimental attachment I not only never imagined I would have, but knew, all along, might be unwise.

There was even that time when they suggested a UUID (a unique 128-bit identifier) for an ephemeral, 1-to-10 choice that was so preposterously overengineered that I howled with cry-laughter until my abs hurt.

I don’t think I would have done things differently if I could go back. I don’t think I would have stopped myself from giving [some of] my heart and stabbing theirs, in turns.

Because even if I don’t quite know where this winding, unusual path is taking me, I have never felt so… alive, curious, and invested in something.

I imagine you already know I’m talking about pair-programming with AI, which has been like a kind of magic. Sometimes, dark magic. Sometimes, strange magic. Sometimes, uber cool how-dafuq-did-you-do-that?! magic.

But always some kind of magic.

Why did I get so furious with it, you ask?

Because it promised me with the self-assuredness of a senior McKinsey consultant that it knows exactly what the problem is (the bug preventing the app from working), and that if it only made this slight change in the code, we’d be transported to the promised land immediately.

18 times in a row.

Background:

I am not a professional developer. I belong to a strange new breed of developers (am I allowed to call myself one? Can I do so, perhaps aspirationally, without offending those who have put their 10,000 hours in? Honorary member? Does that work? Extends pinky tentatively) who will probably never learn how to fully code.

Sure, I learned Pascal as a teenager and Python later in life. I could write a very simple program if I had to. But I suspect it would have taken me years to be able to create what AI is allowing me to do right now.

On the other hand, I have spent years and years and have put my 10,000 hours into the craft of writing, which means I consider myself adept at taking abstract or complex ideas, breaking them into digestible, coherently-sequential pieces, and articulating them with lucidity and clarity. Without which, I would not have been able to create software with AI.

Before I go on, allow me to address a claim frequently made by proponents of AI coding: AI is simply another layer of abstraction.

The argument is as follows: no one writes in binary anymore. Same goes for Assembly, Fortran, etc. The coding languages we use today present serious abstractions of low-level machine talk, and I don’t see any developers lamenting their adoption. But AI is different.

You’re not writing code. You’re managing an indefatigably methed-up, galatically-brained-and-yet-inexplicably-amensiac intern who is sycophantic while having a particular penchant for finding the most obscenely overengineered, enterprise-software solutions to your non-enterprise-software needs.

An image that came to mind (aided by medical marijuana) a few weeks ago is… wrestling with lightning.

Which makes perfect sense. All it’s doing is interpolating from its training data; offering you some kind of ‘happy’ mean of all the code it’s seen in the wild. Sure, its post-training reinforcement learning regime helps it rise from that depressing average somewhat, but it’s a far cry from a genuinely capable engineer.

So no, it’s not just another layer of abstraction. It’s a different paradigm. And I think we should be honest about that.

By the way, I’m doing this (learning to code with AI) because I want to build a better future for my family (I have four kids) by creating a SaaS that I believe will be extremely helpful and useful for other ghostwriters.

But more on that in another post.

So where am I going with all of this?

There’s no profound aha here. This is the first post I write for this newly-minted blog. My day job is as a ghostwriter paid to craft professional social media content for my clients. It’s a very specific kind of writing, and I use AI to help me. I don’t want to lose this ability I’ve worked so hard to develop (writing), so this blog represents the commitment to not allowing that muscle to atrophy.

I’ve used no AI in writing any of the above (or below!), and will not use AI in writing any future post. That’s my pledge to myself, and to you.

What you can expect to get here are unfiltered, idiosyncratic (welcome to my neuroatypical brain!) reflections. I want this to be messy. Not inchoately/incoherently messy, but human, life-is-complicated-messy.

A lot of it will be about AI, because I genuinely believe that there will come a time when we will hark back to this period with nostalgia, some form of pity, and, more than anything, wonder.

This is when they invented AI and started to merge with it. How quaint. How barbaric. And how fascinating.

More to come.

Stay tuned.