I have a complicated relationship with AI. Well - with AI as it is commonly referred to right now which is the use of large language models to generate large portions of text.
On one hand I use it almost every day. I am a software engineer at a startup where the CTO and seemingly every engineer is obsessed with the usage. And lucky for me the company is doing well enough that I can get company-paid-for access to pretty much any tooling I might want. So i've spent a decent amount of time with all of the models and a lot of the tools and let me tell you - I am not that worried about my job security. Yet. So long as there are existing complicated systems and PMs that want to describe how things should be built I am far enough into my career that I am on very solid ground here because these LLMs can be incredibly tempermental in terms of their efficacy depending on the problem.
But that's a story for another time.
In the construction of this website this is truly the first time i've ever used an LLM to try and build something start to finish. And I gotta say... I do understand why people are losing their minds over this. Setting up the bones for this by converting a web project I had started about a year ago, integrating a static site generator, and then deploying the site in total took me checks time on phone less than two hours. And now here I am writing my first blog post about the experience. It is definitely incredible how much time this saved me (not to mention the 200 odd dollars I was paying squarespace for the honor of using their crappy tool).
But I always knew this. This is literally the best use case for this technology. Set up the boiler plate for this project that I have so that I can move on to doing the more interesting things like writing the posts. I know - from making my own sites in the past - how annoying and slow it is for me as a mobile developer to set up a website because I never do it and web development is nowhere close to being in my job description (though I do want to improve in this category). So, yes. I admit. This was tremendously helpful.
And yet I want to vomit. I have moral qualms with how this technology was created, qualms with how it is continuing to be perpetuated, qualms with where the data centers are being set up, qualms with the amount of energy it is gobbling up, and qualms with the use of this technology to steal work that needs to be done by those who need to be paid in order to survive. Through the use of this technology I stare down the barrel of my own livelihood being put in the balance. I am a valuable engineer but it won't matter if someone thinks I'm redundant because they can make a website too.
One thing I don't feel bad about though is that I don't have to use stack overflow to ask questions. That place sucked. Rest in pieces and be nicer to people.