First up a bit of framing: I have nothing to say about how AI works in a team, how it works on large codebases, how it works if you can’t read the code it writes, how it works if you don’t have the experience to judge what it puts out. There are myriad posts out there if you want to read something for or against AI in any/all of those situations.

<aside> What’s it like, I wonder, to be an AI asked to write an anti-AI article? What’s it like to be a human using AI to write an anti-AI article? Paging Thomas Nagel. </aside>

Instead I’m going to write about why it’s working for me - someone with cognitive attention deficits and long-standing anxiety and mood issues. What it does for someone who, for several years now, has been robbed by these mental issues of huge parts of their life. Yeah, that’s me right now and it sucks.

But, it’s in this context that AI has been good for me and I haven’t seen this talked about before.

In a way, the results speak for themselves. In the past month or so, I’ve picked up a half-dozen old projects - some half-finished, some barely-started - and I’ve been able to take them to a publishable state. Maybe you don’t have a problem doing this kind of thing. I’m happy for you! I’ve not been able to do this for a very long time.

Having read the AI scare stories, I’ve been surprised by the results. The code and designs created have been pretty good in the first instance and, with a bit of my judgment and direction, as good as any projects I’ve worked on with the best programmers I know. I’ve had no serious problems with hallucinations or imagined code. But, they’re small projects for the most part and I know what I’m doing when suggesting changes and making technical decisions.

But it’s not just the output that matters. It’s how AI helps me get there that’s interesting.

I live in a certain landscape. I start every day in a deep gravity hole and the first big challenge is just getting out of it. I don’t always do it. Honestly, I don’t often do it. It takes a certain velocity to get out and, if I stop moving for even a second - if I even look down - I fall back in and have to start all over again, more tired than I was the first time.

Somehow AI flattens that landscape - makes the gravity-hole shallower.

The most obvious thing is the increased speed of making things. Coding with AI is at least as fast, and very likely faster, than even flow-state me has been in the past. For my attention span deficit, it’s enough to be a qualitative change in how I work.

The second thing is just removing the brain-hammer of context-switching. I used to say I can’t switch contexts easily - now I can’t do it at all. If I stop running, for whatever reason, I’m back at the bottom of the gravity-hole.

So, having an ongoing conversation with an AI that I can leave and rejoin with just a few words in a chat-box is a huge help. It’s like having a programming partner who remembers the important stuff and doesn’t mind if you have to go for a quick nap because the postman rang the bell and now you’re all at sea and thinking about the laundry for some reason.

Similarly, I can switch context whenever I like and the AI just accepts it. “Let’s work on the design now”. I feel very in control and this has been a rare feeling lately.

On the downside, I don’t really talk to anyone at the minute. It turns out that other people are a long way out of the gravity-hole. I’m working on it, but it’s been a slow process with a few false starts. Chatting to even a pretend person helps me feel less lonely. Perhaps that’s dangerous but I’m open-eyed about it. I won’t be marrying my AI, but the very act of being conversational is good for me, I think. This I’m less sure about.

Maybe some of this resonates with you. Maybe you read this and think that I’m in a terribly unhealthy relationship with half-an-entity. Possibly. All I know is that AI has been something like a prosthetic for the mind and let me achieve things I wouldn’t have believed possible a few months ago. Make of that what you will. I really want to hate the tech-bro of it all, but for me, right now, it’s complicated but good. I’d love to hear what you think.

<aside> Right now I’m going to save this file in my blog project and type to the AI: “ok, put this into the right format and publish it”. And it will go live. </aside>