AI: What I do and don't use AI for

Dated, January 19, 2025

I have officially removed all AI content from my website. The site itself is still being built with the assistance of AI. I would not refer to it as full blown vibe coding. I still don't trust it.

I feel like my personal opinions have become more refined as it comes to AI as well. I feel like I want to see AI improve. I do believe it has its use cases in both business and personal use. I do however think it has become a crutch and is still causing various socio-economical problems (I think that's what it is called).

It does seem that hardware is beginning to catch up and I have impressed with the results of the open source models. They just need to be told what to do - very specifically.

Current goals are to eliminate non-open source AI from my personal life, and focus on optimizing AI usage in the workplace.

Dated, November 24, 2025

Roughly, three months after making this post, things have changed in a minor fashion. I have expanded my hardware to use for AI. I have purchased an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 based machine. I feel like this is bringing me closer to being self sufficient and completely operating on open source models; at least from a personal perspective. I hope this machine and the future of this chip is the start of AI tasks becoming more power efficient and more accessible.

I have further explored Grok and Anthropic based models from a professional stand point. It is definitely interesting what can potentially be done.

The biggest concern I have at this point, is the blind trust people put into it. Don't get me wrong, it is correct a lot of the time, however, when it is wrong it almost feels dangerously wrong. It is like because it is a machine people are gullable.

Lastly, I think the economic concern is becoming more evident. There is a lot of money, real and fake being pumped into AI, from initiatives at non-tech companies, to companies built on prompts or even to companies saying AI. When the economy terms into a real life meme there is reason to be concerned.

Dated, August 28, 2025

I do want to track this as an ongoing thought, as I think this will evolve quickly and so will opinions around it.

If you don't care about my opinions and just want to know how I use it, jump to "How This Site Uses AI" at the bottom.

AI has become a hot topic for both good and bad reasons. I felt this needed to be my first slashpage. I feel most people at this point, have hard stances in two opposite corners, where it's the greatest advance in human technology or it's going to ruin the world. I think either way, we can all agree there are too many AI generated memes out on the internet now... I feel like I sit somewhere in the middle of the arguement.

I do also believe it came to be in a very unethical way (thinking of the stories around scraping information to train models), it still tends to operate in a very sketchy way (In my opinion at least, thinking around copyright laws and artists, etc.)

I do feel AI can do a lot to change the world in a positive way. The way it can accelerate business, coming from a technology and security stand point, it opens a lot of opportunity for immense growth. It also brings technology back into the hands of an individual if done correctly.

Personal

I use it for many things. I also do try to limit the amount of money I contribute to the big open corporate world when it comes to AI. This is how I try to balance the items listed above. I do want to see, open source rule this space of technolgy. I do also worry we are in another economic bubble around AI, but I am not economicist.

My personal stack consists of the following:

I don't forsee that changing, as I don't feel like I will need to change it. I use AI to augment what I do. I use AI to accelerate what I do personally. I don't use AI to tell me stories, or generate content. I have (and will note) that I use AI to generate filler content, but, even then, I note it and limit it.

Some of the projects, I currently have around AI, are attempts to improve my day to day life. The one example project, I like to share is how I use AI in my email filtering. I get a lot of emails and want to manage them better. I have OpenAI (gpt-4.1-mini) filter my emails into category based on the sender and subject. It then gives out a confidence level, and processes it a certain way. If by any level, it defines it at personal, it will just notify me of an email. If it is a newsletter, receipt, or shipping notice as an example, it will be processed and sent to me in summary. I will also receive any unsubscription links in any of these emails.

I have started playing around with migrating to fully self hosted models and I believe I am close. The Jetson can whip through 6b and lower models, while still handling 14-16b models as well.

Professional

I feel fortunately to work somewhere that thinks through these types of decisions. AI has become a part of my professional life. I feel like we are thinking about it the correct way and have the right concerns when looking into how we can use it and where. From a product perspective, we do want to improve how people use AI which I think will be very beneficial to the industry.

I earlier hot take, is that AI will help businesses do business better.

Where AI has helped me most professional is around notes. In my role, understanding and remember history goes a long way. We have ways - and are still looking to improve - to take notes and get summaries based on the conversations as one example. In the near future, we will be able to connect those calls and really contextualize a summary with historical reference.

For day to day tasks, I use a similar stack as above, minus the Jetson. I don't suspect that will change. I use[d] Replit for research and will most likely continue to do so.

How This Site Uses AI

Based on my 'Personal' section, you may be able to guess how I use AI. I do also (at least try) to make it pretty clear when I do.

I use AI to generate code. I would say this site was built with AI assistance. I tend to use AI to build boilerplates, templates, regular expressions, etc. I don't use it to "build a site". In my posts, you will see AI assisted code. I would not say it is fully AI generated, as I tend to use it as a building block.

I do not use AI for the creative content (writing, drawing, etc) - minus one exception - I use AI to create descriptions of my watches with a Vision model. I may change that out as I am not sure how I like the layout of those pages; nor, do I feel they require text.

There are no AI generated images on this site. I also plan to keep it that way, unless, I explictly do a post around "AI image generation" etc. As for personal content, even the cards used in social media. Those are scripted using real images and not generated by AI. I should write a post on that to help people. Noted!

Final Thoughts

I do think the potential here is high. I do also think humanity has done a great job at taking generational discoveries and absolutely ruining the crap out of them. I hope that the beginning of "Generative AI" is simply a dark spot on what it holds in the future, but, based on my previous point, I won't be holding my breath. I just plan to do my best, to make this a good thing for everyone.