The Power of AI

Despite still believing that AI will someday kill us all, I have found myself enjoying the fruits of its labor more and more in recent months. Claude's labor, specifically.

Hello World

2022 was a WILD time to be alive. The height of the pandemic had somewhat subsided, but the effects of it were rolling on. People continued to relocate across the country, the social justice movement inspired by the death of George Floyd was in full swing, pronouns were en vogue, DJT was ramping up for run #2, and...OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT to a largely unsuspecting public. Bang! And just like that, the world changed forever.

I can't tell you how many conversations I had at work about ChatGPT. "No, you can't use it to do your notes." "No, it's not HIPAA-compliant." "No...just...no." But, here's the deal. I'm not a luddite. I'm not a tech curmudgeon and have, often in the past, been an earlier adopter of new tech. But this was different. Early AI models were fraught and unpredictable; their responses riddled with errors and made-up facts and it seemed, could not be trusted. That didn't last long.

3 Short Years

3 short years later, the world is a different place. In that time, it seems things have become much less predictable and for many, more frightening. College students of today are faced with choices about their futures I couldn't imagine making during my formative years, and AI seems to underpin much of the unease. Krispy Kreme drive-throughs are staffed with AI assistants now, and if you haven't noticed AI seeping into your life, it's because it is getting to be that good.

New Promises and Old Fears

So, here's the thing. If one is technically savvy in the least, it turns out AI can be a powerful tool to simplify tasks that previously would have taken weeks (or even months), and that's not fully considering the oncoming barrage of agents that will buy your groceries and find the best deals on obscure products. Take, for instance, this new site. Created in a single day, I now have a new and personal platform that is simple, secure, and easy to manage. Further, over the course of another weekend day, I was able to use Anthropic's Claude to recover every single post of my long-lost blog from over 20 years ago! Claud scripted, scraped, and shaped those old entries into a format my journaling software easily imported. I spent many, many hours searching archives, backups, and old drives for that lost database, and not only do I once again have the data it contained, I couldn't have completed that task over weeks of evening recovery work, and Claude did it in just a few hours.

But here's the rub: every prompt burns virtual tokens and real carbon-based fuels. I'm fully aware that the vast data centers powering my prompts are piling pollutants into the atmosphere minute after minute. This isn't news, and just like many other facets of the modern world, there is no going backward from this. 2022 was an inflection point that changed the trajectory in a moment.

I'm (Not Really) a Developer

Like many technically inclined folks, I've thought for years about apps I would make if I had the skills. Of course, given my position in life right now, the prospect of going back to school to learn to code was for years untenable, and today, that just seems like nonsense. Why? Easy. Since February 19th, I've written 5 new apps, under the moniker Mental Hygienist. Four of them (SplitBook, DriveDeck, FuelDeck, and SinceBook) are my "versions" of apps I've used for years, and one (GearDeck) is a truly unique (I think) creation. As of this writing, two are published on the Apple App Store, and the other two will be posted shortly. It's wild to think that years of conceptualizing these apps culminated in something real and usable, and I have Claude Code to thank for it. I don't plan to be some fly-by-night developer; these are apps I have integrated into my lifeflow and will continue to update and promote. It's pretty wild to be witnessing this change to core humanity in real-time; even the changes brought about by social media took MUCH longer than a couple of years to begin making an impact (at least one we understood).

Working Smarter Isn't a Cliché

There seems to be a lot of fear about the impact AI will make on our work; a fear that seems justified (to me at least). Despite this, I have integrated AI into my daily work and am designating more and more workflows around it, and the truth is, it's helped me tremendously. I have found myself completing tasks and projects far faster than ever and am now looking at handing it some tasks nearly in their entirety. The drudgery of writing a job description is nearly in the past, and any more, if I'm doing any work at all, it's simply proofreading. Sadly, teaching others these tools may also result in a LOT of extra reading as they too are generating more and more content; herein lies the rub. "Slop," as it's known, can be generated in the workplace too. I'm being careful to avoid that.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Clearly, none of us know, but I am both curious and terrified to find out. What a time to be alive!