dannyman.toldme.com

Use the Tool; Don’t be the Tool

Oxide.computer will sell you an on-premise cloud. Type some commands into a great big computer and it will build you a network of smaller computers inside the big computer. That is an exciting idea for an old Systems Administrator like me.

Oxide recently shared their internal guidelines on using AI. Good stuff here. The LLM Anti-Patterns are especially decent: don’t mandate that anyone use LLMs, don’t shame folks who do use LLMs, and, this shouldn’t need to be said: don’t date your LLM!

What Oxide advocates is responsibility. An AI is a tool to build things. What you build represents you. LLMs can generate code very effectively, but that needs to be code you understand and vouch for. Because, at the end of the day, it is your code and you are responsible.

It is all too easy to ask AI to take away your responsibility. When the cartoon or the video clip or the email was obviously penned by an AI, we can tell you aren’t representing yourself. Is your audience not worth your time? Worse: do you feel unworthy of being yourself? We can’t see you through the slop!

At the other end are the “never AI” folks. On Mastodon I see posts float by from people who grouse every time an Open Source project reveals that it will leverage AI to expedite the unrelenting work of building, reviewing, debugging, shipping, and supporting free code. Surely, some projects will incautiously ingest “vibecoded” AI Slop, but in general, Open Source maintainers are passionate and responsible volunteers conscientiously leveraging new tools to deliver a better service to their community. We owe these folks respect and good faith.

Use the tools. Or don’t. Both choices are correct. The wrong choice is to be the tool, by letting the tool be you. Having a “relationship” with your AI is a sad move, and expecting other people to have a relationship with your AI’s slop is disappointing and creepy. Step away from the keyboard and spend some time with a kindred spirit. Head outdoors to feel the sun and the cool breeze tango with each other across your skin. You are too beautiful and too precious to be outsourced to a GPU farm.

NOTE: in the spirit of exploration, I sought feedback from an LLM, “Kimi K2.5 (reasoning)” on how to make this post more readable and engaging. It suggested some early revisions to this post, but every word remains my own.