My AI Manifesto

Do I use AI?

Yes.

Which tools?

Claude Code Max. Cursor Pro. OpenCode. t3.chat. I Still have to try Crush.

What am I using it for?

Pro stuff, like development, automation, agentic workflows. Quite advanced, honestly. Personnal stuff too.

Care to elaborate?

Sorry, no. I've reached my usage limit on hearing the play-by-play of people's chats with ChatGPT. I don't intend to add to the blatant noise.

Any tips?

• If you need to automate predictable tasks, build scripts with AI. Don't use AI to run every automated workflow. It's silly and irresponsible.
• You are not “falling behind” by not extensively using AI. You can learn basic usage in a day, advanced usage in a week, and tools get better by the day at compensating for human shortcomings.
• Listen to people who know their stuff and who know how to convey useful information. I'd recommend starting by: Lee Robinson/Cursor Learn, Matt Pocock/AI Hero, Theo Browne, AIcodeking, and going on from there. As a corollary, if you read a post on a social platform that starts with “It's over”, you can safely mute its author.

Any reasons not to use AI?

I'd recommend reading Matthew Inman's (The Oatmeal) take on AI art. I feel exactly the same as him about AI-generated songs, videos, pictures, video games. Soulless, pointless, and harmful.

Afraid for my job?

I hate strong opinions on this, whether overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. I don't think anybody knows. At least, I certainly don't. What I do know is that I miss coding as a craft. But it's not the marrow of what I do.

What about ethics?

It's complicated. I have strong opinions, but my actions are more nuanced.

The growing ties between AI giants and American political power concern me. The ecological and societal impacts of AI worry me.

To be able to look at myself in the mirror, I try to align my model choices with my worldview as much as possible. It's not easy: the race for dominance often breeds FOMO and FUD, and no player in the market is free from decisions I find questionable. Still, I've made my choices — deliberately, not by default. For now.

Is that em dash AI-generated?

Probably not. On my French AZERTY keyboard, I've always used shortcuts to type proper typography, notably ⌘ - for em dashes and ⌘ ⇧ - for en dashes.

Since the rise of AI, there's been a flood of posts claiming that em dashes are a telltale sign of machine-generated text. What used to be my edge as a typo nerd has turned into immediate AI suspicion. If you see an — on this site, it was most likely hand-typed.

It's interesting how I used to stress over cleaning up every sentence I wrote, and now I'm like, "eh, if something is a little clunky, at least people will know it's me that wrote it instead of AI"

You feel quite negative about AI, don't you?

Nope. I genuinely love how it reshaped the way I work. Heck, I'm a subscriber to multiple AI services, how come you ask this question?