AI usage

My thoughts on using generative AI & LLMs for my personal work and blogging.

This page contains my thoughts on using generative AI & LLMs for my personal work and blogging. I want to start with an obligatory disclaimer: none of these views represent the views of my employer or indicate anything about my use of AI professionally. With that out of the way, I want to write a bit about how I do and don't use AI in my personal work and in particular on this site. Now, let's get into it:

  • To start with, not a single line of prose on this site was written using AI and as of now, I don't ever intend to publish any AI-written content. I feel like I need to start with this because AI-generated content seems to provoke the most passionate feelings on either side of the AI "debate" that seems to be well underway in the replies section to every Tweet/Toot/post about AI. I'm personally not a fan of AI-generated writing and I don't ever intend to use any on my site. I think personal websites are fantastic vehicles for people to publish their own thoughts and I think about AI-generated content here in a similar way to how I think about plagarism. It wouldn't make any sense for me to plagarize someone else's writing on my blog because I'm making this blog for me and not to prove anything to anyone or to make money. In a similar sense, it wouldn't make any sense for me to publish AI-written prose here because it fundamentally isn't my writing and I don't think it benefits me or my readers to publish anything that someone or something else wrote.
  • While the content on the site wasn't made with AI, much of the code powering the site was. The fundamental layout and design and typography and color choices are all mine. The layout of the code structure itself is mine. The choice of frameworks and tools is all mine as well.
    • My process for building the site was to start with a set of ideas and concepts and begin working with an AI coding assistant1 to refine my ideas
    • From there, I had Gemini generate a series of prompts for Cursor2 to build the site based on my ideas and concepts.
  • In my day job at Handshake, I actually do use AI tooling somewhat heavily for my day-to-day work. Operating at a fast startup pace, I think anyone not using AI for coding in some way is putting themselves at a huge disadvantage. We're all-in on Cursor and I move between different models depending on the task at hand.
  • Personally, I've been finding more and more ways to integrate AI into my life in targeted ways. For instance, I've been getting a lot of use out of Poke, the absolutely brilliant AI-driven personal assistant by The Interaction Company of California.

First published on June 7, 2025

Footnotes

  1. In this case, I used Google Gemini since I recently got access to their pro tier and wanted to try it out as a brainstorming partner.

  2. Cursor is an AI-powered IDE built on top of VS Code. It is my go-to tool for coding these days both at work and personally.