A Shiny New Bloggy Home

| Blogging Ai Coding Web Development

This blog is almost twenty six years old (here's the first post from July of 2000). Just like me, it's gone through a lot of changes. It started on Blogger, moved to Movable Type, where I think I had to move it between hosts a couple of times, and then to WordPress where I know I moved it at least four times. It changed text formats at least four times between HTML, Textile, Markdown, back to HTML, to WordPress's Gutenberg. It has over 2,400 published posts, and the archives were always an anchor around my neck when it came to thinking about migrating it again. I'd think about going through and cleaning up the weird formatting (a lot of weird line breaks and backslashes all over the place), and give up after going through a couple dozen posts.

I'd attempted migrating to several static site generators over the years: Jekyll, Middleman, etc, and always ran into at least one deal breaker either technical or personal - mostly personal. I just didn't want it enough to invest the time to fiddle with the code to convert my gigantic archive into something that would work, when what I had was just good enough.

My most recent attempt before last weekend was Ghost. Things were going pretty well until I realized that somewhere between 2000 and 2020, my permalinks went from underscores to dashes (along with the rest of the web) and that I'd have to figure out how to do redirects, and I just didn't have the fucks in the budget to do that.

And then I started a new job.

This is where I think this story is going to take a left turn and we have to talk about generative AI because it's all anyone is talking about these days, or all anyone is avoiding talking about. Depending on the day, I'm in one camp or the other.

In general, I think most people who aren't AI kool-aid drinkers, feel like generative AI is being inflicted on them. They are 100% not wrong. Like crypto (anyone remember NFTs?) and a bunch of other "revolutionary" technologies that came before it, it can feel like a solution in search of a problem, and that's both a marketing problem and a Silicon Valley sycophantic investor problem that I'm not going to get into because it's depressing as hell and I'm glad I've escaped it.

The other problem with a lot of discussions about generative AI is that it's not one thing, or one technology. It's a bunch of things built on top of one revolutionary technology: transformer.

I've got decades of work experience with search, machine learning and even neural networks, and I've been in tech for 30 years so the whole hype cycle of new technology to buzzword to investment boom to marketing hype to crash to people forgetting that there was actually something there at one point, so I've been on this ride before. It's not new, and it's never not disappointing. This time is different in scale and the impact it's having on the every day lives of people, from the loss of jobs, the scale of the money being thrown around and the corruption of the players involved.

My big objections to the marketing push is that the edict in a lot of businesses to "use AI or else" was that there were no guard rails in place to protect customers or employees, and it all felt like an excuse to lay off huge chunks of people; and an excuse to blow huge wads of cash by people who already had more money than they needed, without a plan to deliver any actual value.

That's also the problem with the discussion: we can't separate the marketing, people and the economics from the technology and the ethics behind it. The entire thing feels like The Good Place.

If you've made it this far, you are probably scratching your head wondering what this has to do with a blog. I'm getting there, I swear. Just a few more paragraphs.

Trying to find my line

I left Gusto in July of 2025 after working pretty much non-stop for 30 years. I'd never taken an intentional break between jobs longer than a week. This time, I had the resources to take a real break and I took it. It was incredible. I will write about it eventually, but not now. This is already too long, and it's about the blog, right? Anyway, Jen and I drove a 4,800 mile windy route across the eastern half of Canada. The best thing about driving other than seeing things is that you can't really do anything but think or talk, and I did a lot of thinking. A lot of it was about my own rules around how I would engage with generative AI, because again, it's not just one thing.

So, after five months off, and a month working at Bonusly where I've been using Cursor all day, and been really impressed with the results, here are my rules as of this writing for generative AI and why:

I will be careful who I trust: There are bad actors everywhere. Elon Musk and Sam Altman both give me the icks, and one of them has such a proven record of bad acts that I'll never be involved in anything he's touched, so I'll avoid them, and a whole lot of others. Anthropic, so far, seem to be pretty solid. I really like that they don't have image or video generators at all (their Slack gif creator is charmingly awful and only creates SVGs).

I will reevaluate constantly: things change all the time. Trying to stay on top of things is a losing battle, but I'll do my best to keep up, adjust accordingly, and the rules may change, because I could be wrong.

I will use generative AI for:

  • Coding: I trained myself on openly available code on the web, viewing source on web pages, and looking at open source code.
  • Research: Using tools like NotebookLM to compile sources I provide it isn't all that different from using something like ElasticSearch to index and search anything else I might give it.
  • Transcription and summarization: This can be done by less complex models already, and the tools are good, so I'm OK letting something like Granola summarize my meetings for me.

I will not use generative AI for:

  • Creative work: I won't have it create images, poetry, writing, music, or anything else creative.

I think that's the big objection. It's that we think so little of writers and artists that we're OK with large companies stealing all of the work they've put up on the web to advertize their services over the last thirty years - violating copyright to do it - and then regurgitating it back to us as putrid echos and calling it progress. Yes, it's technically unbelievable that it's possible. It's morally reprehensible. That those giant companies not only seem to be getting away with it, but making trillions of dollars and bankrupting artists along the way, only makes it worse. It's that Google's move from traditional search to AI summaries breaks the unspoken agreement between it and the people who publish on the web that we'll allow you to index our content and put ads around the search results in exchange for sending people back to us. Now that they've broken that agreement, what's our recourse? What's our recourse in any of this? Between Big Tech and Big Trump (which is a whole different topic for another day), a lot of us feel powerless and unheard, which is dangerous for them and us.

So, what's the difference between coding and creative work? I'll try to explain my thinking with an analogy from the world of code.

The web "won" and really took off because normal people without computer science degrees (like me!) could understand HTML, and with the tools they had on their computer: Notepad and a web browser, produce something that worked. HTML was also fairly forgiving. Even with a few typos, the browser would still display something, and might give you a clue where you went wrong. That wasn't true with programming languages, especially the ones available at the time.

Not long after, the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools came along: NaviPress, Netscape Composer, Dreamweaver, Microsoft Publisher, etc. They allowed people who were used to word processors to publish to the web! And boy, those of us who coded HTML by hand, much like the scribes to the printing press, were pissed.

That's what abstraction layers do. They take what's hard and make it not just easy but accessible to more people. I wrote about this back in 2016 in Racing Robots.

And that's where I think we are with generative AI and coding, except today, the S is "say". With a short conversation, What You Say is What You Get and a normal person can have a working piece of software that does something. That's powerful.

There's risk there, though. I think the thing people are running into is that we've accelerated the 0 - 90% part of development, but that last 10% is now a lot harder because you still need professional experience to understand security, performance, networking, etc. That's the next hurdle - how do we help people who've gone run into that 90% wall at the speed of sound and made a huge mess? That's a topic for a different post.

And back to the blog...

Finally! We get a professional development stipend at work, and I used some of it on a Claude Pro subscription, because I was a manager for ten months before I left Gusto and then off for five months so it'd been almost a year and a half since I coded full-time, and even then, not much of that with AI anyway, plus people raved about Claude Code, so I wanted to try it out.

So, I sat on the couch with my laptop, installed Claude Code, created a new empty directory, cd'd into it, fired up Claude Code, and between two three hour sessions with it, I'd:

  • Installed eleventy, configured it and created a theme from scratch.
  • Imported my WordPress archive
  • Created scripts to clean up all of the formatting issues in the archives
  • Implemented dark mode
  • Added tag archives
  • Deployed it

And this weekend, I added month and year archives, and some navigation stuff.

I could write more, but I read this post this week about working with coding tools and it sums up my feelings really well, so I'll spare you.

Back in 2020, Ethan Marcotte wrote a blog post called Let a website be a worry stone that has stuck with me since then and I think about it frequently, and wanted my site to be that, but I hated WordPress, but felt stuck with it. Claude Code has made screwing around with code in my spare time fun again, and that's really something.

So, expect more changes around here.