This blog is going to be more personal
tl;dr ubiquitous LLM access means that there is less and less point in technical notebook entries, TILs, and simple troubleshooting posts. Increasingly I’ll post stuff that’s particular and peculiar to me.
Looking back at the first post of this blog, traverse PHP array in key order (moment of silence for PHP), you may think a blog post like that is totally surplus today in a world where the LLM either writes the code for you, or you ask it how to do that, and it answers with exactly what you need.
In a way, it was surplus at the time of writing, when you could search for and find the same info on StackOverflow or one of many other blogs. However, my idea was to have my own notebook and source that couldn’t be shut down or taken away.
I’m not sure what was the last post I wrote that’s an answer to a trivial coding question, but I’m not motivated to write that kind of post any more. Like anyone else, I can find the info easily, and writing my own answer feels a bit pointless.
Since my motivation is to help the chronically stuck person searching for an answer to their niche problems, the exception to this policy is when the answer is not out there, or the existing wisdom is wrong. This does still happen, and happened to me a year or so ago when trying to host my first Docker/Gradle/Kotlin bundle. I didn’t yet write up that post as I’ve forgotten half of what I did (rookie error).
Whatever we write is going to be ingested by the robots and that is its own kind of bummer.
Nevertheless, in the new world order, the things of the most value are personal, human, warm, specific. It may train AI on what SteGriff thinks, but being observed online (whether by flesh or machine) was always kind of the cost of being online…
The Month Notes will continue whether or not anyone likes them or reads them or cares.
I am still going to make things, mostly without AI, and I feel like leaning into the handmade, brutalist, Glitch era aesthetics EVEN MORE, just to prove that it’s human work.
So, basically, the historically 80/20 split on this blog in favour of technical content over personal recollections and insights is flipping the other way, and we’ll have 80% personal, 20% yak shaving a javascript build error.
Keep it really real ✒🍜