I Fought AI and I Won.
3 years ago I took a break from work. I had been working my ass off with someone who didn't respect my work, burnt out, and then Covid came along. Since I didn't really have any proof of my skills I started to write to put my knowledge and learning in written form for myself. I also put it online for others too. A lot has changed since then.
When I say a lot has changed I am talking about myself and also technology. One of the most significant technological changes is the emergence of AI. Now you can ask AI to write for you and it can whip up a reasonably convincing article. This can be life-changing and will be life-changing.
However, I think learning to write and honing the skill of writing will be even more life-changing. Those that don't get sucked into the short-term FOMO of AI and learn to write will come out on top.
First, I am not saying do not use AI. I am an advocate for it and jumped on the bandwagon as soon as it became widely available. I am kind of late to the party, however, as I am only now looking at leveraging it in my business. Exploring it to help come up with new ideas for proposals and with image creation for web projects.
Even though I will use AI, I am still going to continue writing my tech and design blog because it has helped me in my journey more than anything in the last twenty years of building and creating online experiences for clients. It has helped me to solve problems and articulate more clearly how I am thinking. This one point is worth more to anyone than learning how to prompt and teach an AI. In fact, writing will only improve how you write your prompts.
The stuff I share is basic fundamentals and I hope is useful for learners. I don't share more advanced stuff due to not being able to write clearly at my level of understanding yet. I think my level of writing is always a few levels behind my level of understanding or current production code.
Re-enforcing the fundamentals is never going to be a waste of time and being able to communicate them clearly, even to AI, is not a skill to be scoffed at.
Not only do I feel it important to learn to code and problem-solve for oneself but also think that if you do you will be in high demand as AI will need us to prompt it. It's the 'ole adage of "What do senior developers do better than junior developers? They know how to ask questions on search engines better".
It is only through practising and writing your thoughts down that the skill of asking questions becomes sharper.
Secondly, there is another saying that says something like "We won't need to program if we can write clear enough instructions on what functionality is needed". For people in the know, they understand this is exactly what programming is: instructions for functionality in a language that a computer understands. So being able to write clear instructions in any language will be a high-demand skill.
And as a bonus, making the time to sit down every day and write takes discipline.
This one habit will show not only in the writing but also in the work. So that's it, as we get more time because of new tools being created, use that time to improve yourself and writing every day is a proven way of doing that.
I hope you like this short thought piece, I indeed enjoyed writing it. If you are interested in design and web development, be sure to sign up for my newsletter where I share what I am learning and exploring. 100% human-written with no help from AI. (AL is my alter ego though).
Thanks for reading and until next time seize the day!