how i use ai

in a nutshell:

• ✅ i use it for code
• ✅ i use it to learn
• ✅ i use it for ideation
• 🔵 i always review what ai gives me
• ❌ i don't use it for media generation
• ❌ i don't use it to summarize stuff for me
• ❌ i don't use it to generate long form content
• ⏩ read ahead to see me expand on these points

at the time of writing i released a project that uses ai to give you writing suggestions. it's meant to be used with small text snippets but with gemini's 1 million context window, you can throw anything at it really. with how lazy people are about ai i wanted to be clear about how i use it

i've always liked github's "copilot" branding because it perfectly encompasses what i think ai should be used as: a tool that can work alongside you if you wanted. people often make ai do everything for them, which is something i do my best to stay away from. there are cases where i will lean on what ai generates, but i always review what it makes.

lets get into specifics

✅ programming

i sometimes use ai when i'm writing code. i used to have github copilot in my editors but removed it a while back.

i'll ask ai for simple code snippets if i know its an easy task or if its something that i know generally has a solution, so i know it won't hallucinate something and have me double checking in a stack overflow answer

anything more involved, depending on complexity, i will still go out and search for whatever i need. something that's still relatively simple, i will query ai for and do my own google search to get a concrete answer. something more involved i'll go look at stack overflow answers myself (yes, i still remember what stack overflow looks like (but no, i still don't know what the home page looks like))

sometimes i will ask for some suggestions on how i can go about implementing something. other times i'll ask for a general outline for things i know i want or have some idea of knowing how to do

to me, ai is very useful for programming under close supervision. turning questions into a conversation for more complex topics is particularly helpful

there are times when i ask for something i don't know how to do at all. something i like ai for is its particularly good for learning

but only if you do it right!

✅ learning

sometimes (but not always), i like to query ai for things i don't know. i've found this particularly useful for programming

one example of this that comes to mind is when i was working in unity. game development is a huge beast on its own and having to learn how unity does it on top of everything is a bit difficult. so i'd query ai for how to do something simple (like player interactions) and i would take its answer and do my own search to get more details and verify that what i was given me was solid information. it made it easy to get a good answer for me to make my own thing

so its useful to use ai as a starting point. this was particularly useful with the project i mentioned at the beginning, which used imgui to create the interface. it has a LOT of useful things but its buried across different source files that are very long. ai helped surface relevant things to what i wanted so i could go look at the information myself (which i did a lot of, jumping around multiple very long files and a lot of github issues). if anything, ai is at least useful as a very powerful documentation search.

these two are things i already had some kind of foot in the door. but ai is useful for creating something practical in areas you don't know anything about. in the same project, it was extremely helpful for making the very nice shader that runs in the background.

Latent Writer's UI and shader background.

i still looked at tutorials and videos and such but getting this shader to its final state was a back and forth conversation with Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 03-25. i knew what effect i wanted and knew what effects i wanted to combine to get the shader (such as perlin noise for an organic looking randomness, which was replaced with the more performant simplex noise per the Gemini's suggestion). Gemini helped put it all together for the final product. i don't exactly know if its the best it could be (code wise or performance wise) but for a project i made in my free time i was happy with the result. if it was a paid job i would've taken the time to have a concrete understanding, but as it stands:

I think it looks good to me.

🔵 crediting (bonus)

so far i haven't been specific about the model i use, i've just been saying "ai." that's because now a days any model will do the job for what i use ai for.

but i did specifically mention Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 03-25 toward the end of the previous section. i think its important to put credits for things i didn't do. i do this for ai as well

if ai generates something i think i could've reasonably come up with (generally simple snippets) i won't attach a credit. BUT if what is generated is something i would've needed to have spent a good chunk of time on, i will credit the ai model accordingly in lieu of the ai having made its own commit. Latent Writer credits Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 03-25 as if they had been a team member for the significant contributions in help, feedback, and some code contributions (particularly the shader).

Not real, but pretend Gemini's there too.

✅ ideation

i don't expect ai to come up with something novel for every single thing it produces, but i think its a good way to brainstorm ideas. it often makes a good starting point.

a good illustration of this is what i use ai for most. next to programming stuff, the thing i use ai the most for is to get suggestions for stuff i'm writing. i made Latent Writer as quick, dedicated way of doing this. it uses Gemini to generate various kinds of suggestions for whatever text you give it. i only ever ask ai for suggestions on small text snippets though. sometimes i may ask for a paragraph just to get some idea of text structure, but i'd never take it and hand it off as my own writing

in fact, often times i don't actually end up using the suggestions ai will give me for my snippets. i'll look at them and all of them won't quite be what i'm looking for, but it'll spark something in my mind and i'll write my own thing

"is useful for creating something practical" is what I ended up writing.

going back to programming, ai tends to at least give me a good starting point for anything i ask. in general, ai is nice for bouncing ideas off of so you can get the gears turning and arrive at something on your own

I looked into Gemini's suggestions but didn't end up using any. But it did lead me to what I ended up with.

🔵 reviewing

ai tends to "hallucinate" in its answers. this is a softer way of saying it'll straight up lie to you or tell you the wrong thing. its not its fault, there may come a day when this is solved. but even then, i will still be reviewing everything ai generates for me, as i do now

i give everything a good look to make sure whatever is generated actually fits with what i am doing. but above all, i review everything so i understand exactly what the ai generated. yes, the answer follows my prompt and does what i asked, but i need to know how it did it. its answer is not a black box thats contained away, its being placed alongside my own work and i need to know how it all fits. i especially do this for text snippets where i need to do something i don't quite know how to do. it adds on to my own knowledge by seeing what the ai does and searching online to see if its right (and a good way to do whatever it is its doing).

This is particularly why I can't get behind ""vibe coding."" Generating an entire codebase without knowing anything about it doesn't sit right with me. Yes, I could read the code that gets generated and take some time to understand it, but doing it myself piece by piece builds a different kind of knowledge. Programming is understanding after all.

❌ media generation

for the past 10 or so years i have made all of my desktop wallpapers (except for just one, the one i use now, because its unique and i like how it looks very much)

i've made most of the profile pictures i use on my main accounts, with some of them being drawn by friends (such as my current one drawn by this guy)

i very much like all of my desktop wallpapers, profile pictures, minecraft skins, banners, phone backgrounds, lock screen wallpapers, and more. i enjoy them not because they're uniquely mine, or even because i made them, but because they are very essentially me. and i am VERY picky about me. i always make sure i'm proud of whatever it is i'm putting my name on.

there are people that are very passionately against "ai art" and things that encompass that sort of thing. as someone who values the unique work of talented people and the individuality of their work, i understand the sentiment. i have a good number of friends and acquaintances who are artists and i respect their opinions and work.

that being said, i do think the fact that ai can generate images is neat. i can understand that there are some real, useful applications for it. but like most of ai, its a cheap shortcut that you have an option to take or not take. it does the job. and sometimes its pretty cool the things it comes up with! but that is not a shortcut i like to take.

A computer made this. Neat! Interesting. But no. Credits: Imagen 3 / Whisk

❌ summarization

just like i don't like having ai generate long reports for me, i don't like having long reports summarized back to me. i place a lot of value in nuance, intention, and context. summaries completely erase those 3 things.

this isn't even a problem with ai's tendencies to hallucinate, i simply do not like having long form content condensed down to almost nothing. i appreciate an abstract, but i will still read the entirety of something i need to look at. also, a human will know what key things are most important to have in an abstract. ai doesn't have much thought or any intention behind one it makes.

one recent example of this is while i was in Google's "5-Day Gen AI Intensive Course." each day had a different paper and a long summary in the form of a podcast generated by the NotebookLM ai hosts. it may be that i prefer to read things over watching/listening to something, but i could not stand having a summary of the paper read to me. so i took the time to just read each day's (very long) paper. to be fair, it seemed like the NotebookLM podcast summaries did do a good job of hitting each key point. but i noticed there were just certain key details you'd miss out on, as is the nature of a summary.

now, i do tend to bend this rule a bit when it comes to programming. but as i said, i still review what ai gives me and i go out of my way to look things up and understand what something is doing before putting it in my project. ai sometimes brings key points together which makes it useful as a starting point for me to go off of and look at things myself

❌ long form content

as i hope i've made clear, i think understanding is a crucial part of your work. obviously, right? but as i said previously, ai has opened a cheap shortcut for a lot of things, and people tend to take them in the laziest way possible

i will never hand off a long report made entirely by ai with my name on it. i might write a long report myself with bits and pieces that ai helped me with. some short phrases might be synonyms that i take straight from an ai's suggestion. but handing off significant pieces of content without me having no part in it other than a prompt is not something i will ever do. should ai get so good that it becomes a good option, as with deep research, the ai will entirely be credited, without my name on it.

Like this.

🔶 "okay but"

>ai doing your work makes you faster

i put instant ramen in the microwave. ding! i am not happy with my meal.

yes, ai does make me faster, but i use it in the same way using a can opener is faster than using a knife or something

>ai makes better work than you

for now maybe. not by the time i'm done

i do expect the work ai does to get better and better, but i will too. and at some point i'll have the quality to make something and back it with something ai cannot: nuance and intention

>then you're dismissive of ai and its progress

no, reread the post from the beginning. i consider it one of my most important tools.

although i don't use things like media generation or long form summarization, i am eager to see how ai advances and keep my own benchmarks for when i consider using it for something. i'm already warming up to deep research and use it as i do with ai right now: a starting point for my own reference

>you're ignoring the cutting edge

no, i keep up with the buzz

>you're not future-proofing your career

my career is not based on the latest model. a model changing how it outputs does not throw me off my work

my experience, as i build it, future-proofs my career