I want to look smart

I guess I don’t want to look stupid. I want to look smart.

So after reading the email responses and comments I got to yesterday’s post, it’s clear at least a few people are wondering if I’m anti-AI or whatever. I’m not. I’m a power user. I use it every day. I love the whole scene. Mostly.

The agentic coding tools are sick as fuck. I dig the novel, compiled outputs from NotebookLM. And for text outputs, I LOVE the more advanced consoles & developer tools from the foundation model companies (Anthropic is my favorite). They’re way cooler than the consumer-facing chat products. I have more control of the token usage and how the previous messages in the “chat” are managed.

I fucking hate not knowing how standard-issue ChatGPT or Claude is compacting and compressing context. There’s always a point where the quality and feeling of the responses starts to degrade. These advanced tools are more expensive, but the output is just so much better.

Sure, there is a sort of dread about it eating everything that I have been building my career on. At least, the technical, day-to-day activities that make up the larger systems and products that I’ve made money with. So is there a concern about it making me irrelevant? Sure.

So the post I made yesterday, I wasn’t planting a flag or claiming that I don’t believe in or use AI. I suppose I felt stupid for how i used it in those particular posts… I took the fucking easy road. the normie road.

“Hey ChatGPT, take this and ‘use my voice’ 🙄 and turn this into a Substack post.”

Writing is not exactly my favorite thing to do. It’s hard. I’ve never felt good at it, even when hundreds or thousands of people have told me otherwise… explicitly, or implicitly by buying my shit and taking action or whatever. Maybe I have some romanticized vision of what writing looks like for someone who is genuinely good at it? I’m not sure.

I actually tried a few early versions of ChatGPT and I was like “this shit sucks.” But late 2024, I tried the voice chat in ChatGPT and was like “holy fucking shit.” It was like an on-call thinking partner that never got tired. I could give it a half-baked partial idea and it helped me think through it and made it feel complete and like it made sense. I suppose it made me feel like a fucking genius.

I have thousands of notes/documents on my computer with half-finished ideas, and even more quick-and-dirty Instagram posts. It made me think that I might be able to turn all of this shit into something coherent… maybe I could figure out what it all means.

I could do the part I loved… the starting of a thing, the initial spark, the big picture, the high-level strategy, then I could let AI do the parts I didn’t like so much.

So that’s what I did. I used the purest version of my voice as source material (raw transcriptions from voice notes), but I let AI kind of run wild with making meaning and wrapping things up in a more easily digestible way…

Reading them back now makes me fucking cringe. It’s like “fuck you, you fucking choad try-hard sellout.”

It stripped the life and ambiguity and uncertainty from my ideas and stories.

Like if I used AI to write this post, it wouldn’t just leave it hanging there… it would try to wrap it up with some horse-shit, like:

“At the end of the day, the most powerful tool in your creative arsenal isn’t artificial — it’s the messy, imperfect, deeply human voice that no algorithm can replicate.”

EAT A FUCKING DICK.