Affirming Against the Slovenly

I’ve rebuilt my blog.

Yes, my old blog was perfectly serviceable. It did what I needed it to, which, given my actual (not aspirational) posting frequency, was precious little. I rebuilt it because I’m a cliche developer who does cliche things. We all do it; that’s why it’s cliche. I’m sure you understand. It’s just basic maths.

What you might not know is that I’m recovering from some health issues that resulted in significant cognitive dulling. I’ve been having trouble reading books, writing code, and basically anything that pegs the ol’ CPU core at 100%. It was so bad that I’ve had to take time off of school and work. So if you thought I was rather a dumb fellow before, boy howdy—you should have seen me a few months ago.

I’m starting to recover, and I thought my fingers would remember their old strength better if they grasped my sword. And by sword, I mean keyboard. I’ve been out of the development game for a while, so I figured a fun (cliche) project would be a good way to see how things have changed.

Waking Up to Minds of Metal and Wheels

It seems I’ve slept through a revolution, and the machines have all but taken over. Does anyone write code by hand anymore?

This blog rebuild was accomplished using AI significantly—mostly Claude Design and Claude Code. I built not only the blog but also an entire visual language. I plan to make little personal apps for myself using this blog’s visual style.

The main thing I’ve noticed with this new superpower is that I can add small features, extra ornamentation, internal tools, embellishments, etc. that I never would have taken the time to do before. The little animations and flourishes you see on this blog are things that I’ve always been able to do myself, but never thought it made sense to bother doing before because the time-to-reward ratio made the idea quite silly.

Naturally, this is a real temptation for a pixel-peeping perfectionist like me. But I think it’s definitely a net benefit.

This brings me to what may be the thesis for another post. I’ll state it here and perhaps defend and explicate it in a future post.

I think that ‘AI slop’ is not a necessary outcome of using AI. Lazy people have been doing sloppy work since Cain and Abel (there’s a pun in here about ‘cAIn,’ but I’ll refrain—you’re welcome).

Can you use AI to make more than slop? We affirm against the slovenly.

AI makes it possible to work very, very quickly. And AI does tend to be sloppy. But if you’re not a lazy slob and you take your time with it, you can use its speed to increase your iterations. Building beautiful things usually involves trial and error. People who release slop skip trial and just ship error. If you’re careful, you can ship more and better versions of the things you love to make.

Speaking of more and better, that’s my hope for around here. AI certainly gives one a lot to write about, and I’ve got something of a backlog of post ideas that aren’t related to AI that I need to start on. What I can say is that I’m more optimistic about writing regularly than I have been in some time.

David looked at how shiny the blog he had made was and smiled. “How can I not write on this shiny new blog? I’m sure I’ll post more now,” he thought. But even as he smiled, he knew that having a shiny new blog has never stopped him from neglecting it before.