Blogging into the void

It's been almost a year since I last posted on this site. It's true that life has become a lot busier, but that's not the primary reason I've slowed down posting. I've had plenty to say, I just can't avoid the feeling that I'm no longer writing for random nerds with similar computer issues, but for large language models that will take my work and regurgitate it to their users who prefer AI responses to blog posts.

In a sense, I'm being silly because the advent of the LLMs has not measurably harmed me. Very few people visited my website before these chatbots began generating answers. It's not as if I'm experiencing some enormous drop in traffic or a loss of revenue (I don't advertise). I'm not worried about losing notoriety because nobody knows me now. Still, I'm bummed.

I post things to my blog because, as a self-taught web guy, I feel an obligation to contribute to the community that helped me get to where I am. I do it to give back. My programming knowledge largely comes from reading blog posts written by other community members. Reading others' work was a huge part of the learning process. But let's be real about this; those days are gone.

LLMs are better at certain things

I don't consider myself anti-AI. Despite having enormous concerns, I use it all the time. I am lucky enough to have learned to write code the "slow way," so I'm able to ask very pointed questions and critically evaluate the returned answers. It's awesome as a programming language polyglot to ask for a method call without having to dig through an API. It's really great to paste in error messages spit out by the server to help in debugging.

I get why someone would ask ChatGPT how to center a <div> vertically rather than go to Google, scroll through ads and results, bounce between a couple of blogs, and get a bad suggestion, go back to Google... I totally understand the dynamic, but don't know where my writing (at least the technical stuff) fits in anymore.

Moving forward

So, I think I'm probably going to do what many people already have and slow way down on my technical writing. Lol, it's hard to go slower than I already was. Writing technical posts about programming is just food for the big AI labs at this point. It seems pointless and a bit sad. Readers will never experience my typos, analogies, poor humor, etc., anymore. There will be no more "thanks for this." posts on social media. I'll lose the feeling of connection to the web development community.

Speaking of analogies, I'm someone who enjoys being anonymous in large groups of people. I love being in big cities. I enjoy being part of the entire scene, while being able to move about as I please. That's how I used to feel about my website. I was in this gigantic, busy, digital space, trying to be helpful to anyone who shared a similar interest, while being able to keep to myself at the same time. I enjoyed being around other people doing the same.

Now it feels like we've all moved out of the cities, onto our own land, where we ask a computer how to get rid of the weeds in our lawn instead of our neighbor. And the computer will probably give you a suitable answer. The response will be direct and to the point, and you won't have to listen to your neighbor talk about needing to clean the leaves out of his gutters. But is that better?

Going into the future, I expect to use my site to post more vibes and less code. Like, I recently started deploying this site with Kamal and had a relatively enjoyable experience. I'll probably mention things like that and forgo all the steps to get something like that up and running. I'll leave that to the LLMs.

Bleh.