AI is the new Shake Weight
Growing up in the age of hipsters, I have an eerie skepticism of anything new. When my family started using AI, I was immediately turned off by it. I’m a self pronounced AI-hater, claiming that my trust issues make it complicated for me to use any of these agents.
To be a true hater, you must be a bit knowledgeable about what is going on. So I decided to use my Github Free Copilot AI to set up a simple Hugo website for myself. It is something I’ve done many times before, so it shouldn’t be that hard.
The Good
I am using the Digio-Theme which comes with some assets I would have trouble recreating (such as the image on the front page).
AI worked well with taking in my export from medium and converting the content into blog posts, which I have done before and is tedious. Or having AI take in my resume in PDF format and convert it to MD. For tedious, mind-numbing simple tasks, this worked well.
For image generation, it struggled - but we got there. For me I can ask it to fill in a part black that would be (again, tedious) for myself to do, and it can succeed. But there needs to be some manual intervention and editing to clean up whatever it generates.
The Bad
My sister, who works as an incident manager at Meta, touts that AI is not bad, it is the lack of oversight.
At dinner last night a friend said, “Well could it just have been you writing bad prompts?”
If I wrote a DevOps tool that spit out twenty thousand lines of code in a PR because I was holding it wrong, the community would grab their pitch forks.
When I was struggling to debug an issue when pushing the website to Netlify, and Netlify’s AI agent made a mega-deedee-doodoo sized pull request against my repository, at first I didn’t bat an eye. The problem I am seeing with how I use AI, and how many people may be, is that you inherently feel that you shouldn’t have to double-triple-check it.
The whole point is it does the work for me, right? Or else… I would have just done this myself. While waiting for Netlify’s AI agent to make its humongous pull request, I was able to smash its “retry” button over and over while watching YouTube videos.
AI makes it easy mindless.
The Ugly
Growing up I had an old flip phone my mother bought me, and with it I spent over $100 on her debit card on ringtones. I didn’t understand why she was so mad then, it was only $100 over the course of six months on ringtones that made me look really cool. As an adult now, I feel robbed whenever I spend over $100 on groceries.
When setting up my website on Netlify they have switched to a new plan (all legacy plans, like mine, had to opt in to this) which is a “credit based plan”.
“Pay to use the Netlify AI agent, it’ll get your deployment up and running!”
Of course I paid for it. The problem I have with AI is that it leverages the parts I hate about my brain against me.
I am lazy, so if you say an AI agent can do something for me, and all I have to do is give my credit card details, I will give them to you. I will then spend the next three days clicking “retry” without a clue of what the problem is. For me, an ADHD girlie , AI encourages me to turn off my brain, watch Youtube and let it do the work.
The Shake Weight was a shaking weight that was supposed to make you lose weight and get tone without doing any work. Just sit back, let it vibrate in your hands, and watch TV. The shake weight came with exercises you could do with it - but I doubt many people did.
I am a simple human, I seek out dopamine through comfort and laziness. If you told me I could get absolutely jacked watching Youtube and standing on a vibrating plate, I would be all about it! But that isn’t how the world works.
By leveraging AI to build this blog in more complex ways (like figuring out the deployment issue onto Netlify) I wasted time and money. In the couple of minutes I spent reading Netlify’s error logs myself I realized that I had mismatched Hugo versions in various places, and that NPM needed to be installed on the container that Netlify was using to deploy my website.
Easy, it took me maybe 10 minutes.
If I would have paid attention I could have saved myself $10, and two days of clicking “retry”.
A lack of oversight, or a system designed to make you not pay attention?