Thoughts on AI

Like everyone in the field I have some mildly interesting thoughts on AI in its different facets. Want to hear them?

Writing a script that does exactly what I want it to do is superior to any SKILL.md that describes a format. Even if LLMs are impressively great at it and it works nine out of ten times, as soon as the model changes or whatever, it's getting tricky. Vibe-coded scripts are ok if they do what I want them to do.

AI slop bros on YouTube are telling you how you can make money with AI automations and agents and it's all a scam. These dudes are making money by selling shovels to people who want to dig for gold. Their marketing skill set¹ barely works for their own shovel-selling-business, and they are always dependent on a black box nobody really understands. Models change every month and then the complex marketing pipeline doesn't work anymore, because how to debug a chain of Skill.md? It's vibes. And if you are one of the poor souls that sold a Claude Sonnet 4.5 based flow for 1000s of money and the new model comes out and the client's workflow doesn't do what it's supposed to do? Good luck arguing with them or the model. It's a maintenance nightmare. The Slop bros just burn tokens to lure you into their “community”² to sell you a set of Markdown files that someone else wrote and that already went through 5 iterations to rephrase it.

All of that snake oil was squeezed out of someone else's work.

(sudden pivot...)

Artists are rightfully upset. Their work got taken without consent, fed into a training corpus, and the output gets sold back as something new. I've heard the argument that AI learning from images is similar to an artist absorbing influences from other artists, and there's something to that. But the compute power blows that comparison out of proportion. A person spending a lifetime taking in the work of others is not the same as ingesting billions of images in a short amount of time to chew them out.

Nobody keeps artists from making art with their hands. The upsetting part is that it's getting harder and harder to monetize it. And that's a newer problem than it might seem. Income from creative work always depended on either public institutions or commercial entities using art in marketing and media. Landing one of those positions was always competitive. It helped if you also had commercial skills on the side like sound engineering, graphic design, copywriting, and made your actual work separately.

Full-time art careers only really became a thing at scale once public funding existed. When money gets tight, culture budgets are the first cut. We act like art is sacred until we have to pay for it. For most artists, making a living from it is still a privilege.

By the way, guess who is not so keen on public funding and especially funding art? And who loves to churn out cheap generated content and call it democratizing the arts?

AI coming out of ordinary research is one thing. Taking human work without consent and selling the output back as something new is another. The research was probably always going to happen. The scrape-and-resell part wasn't.

Ideally this would all be free to use, but someone has to pay for the compute: energy, chips, storage. And none of that accounts for the people whose work trained the model. I'm not sure how that ever works out fairly.

None of this changes that I use it on most days and find it genuinely useful. Mostly for coding: explaining things, writing boilerplate, catching what I missed after staring at it too long, natural language search in new and old code bases. I found the Socratic method skill to be a good way to find the solution myself³. I'm also getting really tired when it comes back with a wall of text that is mopre than I asked for. Read my mind please!

Edit 2026-05-16: here is another interesting layer on the intersection of AI, art and perception. Someone ran an experiment and asked for opinion on an AI generated painting in the style of Monet and people had all kinds of explanations why AI art sucks.

Top comment nails it, in my opinion.

Most humans are not very good at objectivity. They need to know who said or did something before they can decide how much they like or agree with it. (Randall Spangler)

To judge art without context is hard. Art lives through stories and images that help us to express our own feelings and dreams. And if the story is: This Monet is AI and you hate AI, then that's the outcome. I wouldn't fault anyone for that.