How I use AI

What I use AI for

• Writing and reviewing code
• Drafting documents, plans, and assessments
• Research and background reading
• Analyzing logs, data, and codebases
• Drafting the writing I publish

That list is deliberately broad. Assume AI touched most of what I produce. This page is here to say what that does and does not mean.

What that does not mean, and how the work is checked

AI is not the author and it is not the decision maker. You are hiring my judgment, and a model does not have any. My name on a deliverable means I am accountable for it. If it is wrong, that is on me, not on a tool.

I am not going to tell you I read every line of everything I ship.

Nobody shipping at this pace does, and you should not believe anyone who says otherwise. What I run instead is layered review: automated code review, tests, type checking, and security and license scanning. Anything touching authentication, payments, customer data, deletion, or a public interface, I read myself. The rule is proportional to blast radius. No CTO has ever read every line their team shipped either. What they own is the system that catches problems, and so do I.

Generated code gets a stricter review than hand-written code, not a looser one. It arrives confident, plausible, and occasionally wrong in ways a person would not be wrong.

I can always explain what a deliverable does and why it is built that way, without the tool in front of me. If I cannot, that is a defect, and I fix it.

On quality

I do not ship slop.

If part of a document or a module cannot justify why it is there, it comes out. Nothing goes out unverified, whether a person or a machine drafted it.

Volume is not the product. AI makes it trivial to produce forty pages where four would do. Where these tools make me faster, you get the time back. You do not get more pages.

Other people's work

I respect copyright, trademark, and trade secret, and I do not use these tools to get around any of them.

I check generated code for license contamination before it ships, the same as I check it for security. I do not prompt for imitations of a living artist's style or for anything carrying somebody else's mark. If I worked for your competitor last year, what I learned there stays there, and the tools do not change that.

What I publish

The writing on this site, my newsletter, and my posts are drafted with AI assistance. The idea is mine, the argument is mine, the edit is mine, and every factual claim is checked against a primary source before it goes out. When I get something wrong, I correct it in place and say what changed.

Some cover and header images on my newsletter and posts are AI-generated, and I say so where it is not obvious. No AI-generated imagery goes into client deliverables. I do not use AI-generated video, anywhere, in anything.

The problems with AI are real

I am not going to build with these tools and pretend the technology is harmless.

I wrote a long piece working through it section by section: the water and power data centers pull out of the communities they land in, training sets built from work taken without consent, the labor conditions behind the cleanup, and what always-available chatbots do to people. It is here: The Problems with Data Centers and AI.

The through-line is not for or against. It is who decides and who pays. I still use these tools, including for that essay, and I check every number in what I produce against a source you can open yourself. The technology does not decide whether it is a machine for taking or a tool that helps a person think harder. The person using it decides.