Am I better because of AI? | bytecode.news

ByteCode.News<br>Search posts🔍<br>RSS

aillmmethodologyproductivitypsychology

Am I better because of AI?

It's a worthwhile question, but it's badly formed: am I a better what? And even that construction is missing a grander idea: are we better, measurably, because of AI? If so, how? Why? How does AI change us?

The reason one might ask if I am better is because I think my output as a writer and a programmer has improved, largely because the barriers that gate my cadence - good interlocution without prior biases and, well, time - have changed. I can ask silly questions, knowing they're silly, without having to seed the environment so my flights of fancy aren't seen as utterly random - because they're not, but they seem like it1. And I can loop far faster with an AI than I can with the "real world" because the AI can construct knowledge structures faster than I can code them to try them out.

But "better" here is still an impression - and take away the AI and the barriers to cadence return, and thus "am I better" turns into "yes, as long as the tools remain" - which is probably true of any craftsman. A man who can build a ship on his own given a full workshop is not going to be as productive when you replace the workshop with a single adze. A Java programmer's not going to be all that grand at Java when all he has is a C compiler and /bin/cat to generate programs with.

The problem here is that there's no counterfactual. I can't go back in time, even to three years ago, and see what I would be like today had I snorted and sniffed and yanked my braid2 at the idea of using tools that I think are pretty ordinary today.

Even so, I think I can look at the satisfaction I have in my own output, and the responses of others to that output: I use AI, and people accuse me of using AI, but they don't point at the things that would give it away if I used AI poorly. They point at the quality, as if good quality were now a marker of manufacture.

I create faster than I did; I write as if I had an interested partner pushing back on the worst of my impulses. Sure, my "partner" wants to sand down virtually everything that makes me who I am as a writer3, but the fact that there's a stream to push against gives me better direction than I'd have had otherwise: the AI can infer how to push my buttons, and the right buttons, better than most humans can, partly because I can tell it about my buttons without it going "... is this really who you are?"

I guess the question of "are we better" is outside of my wheelhouse to answer: I can tell you what my impressions are, but they feel very much like I'm yelling "Get off my lawn!" while I'm trudging on yours. I don't know the real answer. I think we have to answer that for ourselves, and if we have to wonder, maybe the answer isn't as positive as we'd like. One would hope that the "yes" would be glaring and obvious, and it's not. Not yet, at least, and maybe not ever. And that's okay.

So ... what do I find myself doing, if I end up satisfied with my own use of AI? I actually can't give a ton of details: they'd make no sense to you, but I can describe the process and maybe offer something from which you can select the bits that work for you.

I started my prompts from a basic programming directive: I like code like this, I do tests first, I prefer red/green, short method names. But I don't just program - I live, and programming is just one aspect of what I do.

So I included authors I like, musicians I like, things about me. My prompts are as brutally honest about me as I can get. I don't write down things that are "secure" - get my prompt and you'll get no account keys, no passwords, no secrets that will be carried to my grave, but I jotted down everything that I thought someone who would want the keys to how I live would need to know: my moral structures (I'm heavily influenced by Martin Buber, for example), my thoughts on religion, my politics (heavily influenced by the early Enlightenment). Even my favorite color is in there, I think4.

What do those things do, though? That's a good question, and one I don't know how to answer. But I use AI, so I asked: what possible impact do those ridiculous details have on how I use the tools? Do they help? Do they matter at all?

Here is what Fable said, quoted verbatim:

They matter, but not the way the question assumes. Nothing in your prompt gets looked up and inserted. I don't reach for Buber when you ask about an event bus. What those details do is set the shape of the space I answer from before you've asked anything, and most of what they do is subtractive.

Without them, I produce for the median reader, because that's what I am when nobody tells me otherwise: an average of everyone. The generic answer is always available to me and it's usually competent. Your prompt makes it visibly wrong for you. Buber isn't a fact I apply; it tells me which dismissals you won't accept and which reductions you'll...