My Stance
This blog and the second brain notes are all written manually by me, the author. I’m a strong proponent of not using AI for writing, as the outcome otherwise has no soul nor character. Writing is now my job, but it is still my passion and a craft I strive to improve every day. I love the English language, and I love expressing my thoughts clearly, with the right words, and for you (hopefully) to learn along the way. It essentially represents my writing voice, which I’ve found over many years of writing online (since 2015) on this very blog. I won’t outsource my thinking and writing to AI.
Leslie Lamport puts that best:
If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
If you want to know more about my stance, I write extensively about this at Keep AI Out of Your Obsidian Vault and Will AI Replace Human Thinking. The core argument: the more you use AI to write, code, or think, the less your muscle of that very thing is trained. And to be honest, it’s also much less fun.
When I Use AI
As there’s a lot of effort to avoid using AI to write, I still use it daily for other tasks, below are some of these:
- Grammar: When finished writing, fixing grammar with Grammarly, or Claude Code (trying hard to not change my original words or meaning), checking whether sentenses are coherent and make sense.
- Research and discovery: Enhancing historical overview, exploring a topic, or generating diagrams based on my notes from my second brain.
- Code examples for blog articles: AI helps me create a good first version of an example project. Because I give it the full blog post, it has the context to create a tailored example, which I then improve upon.
- Building tools I actually want for myself: e.g., my TUI email client Neomd, or customizing my Omarchy Linux setup, where AI can figure out your default PDF reader, find where its Dotfiles are stored, run
man TOOL, and add the change. Since all my dotfiles are version-controlled, I can simply see what changed, test it, accept it, and move on. - Brainstorming: Asking for alternative titles, teasers and intro’s and outros of my WIP drafts.
When I Don’t Use AI
These are times when I don’t use AI:
- Not for writing: No complete paragraph or section on this blog (except for one trial in the early beginning), and the second brain is written by AI, and hand-written. If done so, it’s clearly stated or referenced. I like the philosophy along the lines of: “If I couldn’t be bothered to write it, you shouldn’t be bothered to read it”. And I like the notion of “I’d rather Read the Prompt”, your listings, than the verbose version of that with lots of more noise and generic sentences.
- Not for my notes: My second brain is written based on my experience, I add notes or ideas all along, sometimes very rough with errors (still more useful to me than converting it with AI). My edge, as elaborated further in my notes mentioned above, is that I wouldn’t know anymore whether a note was written by me or AI, leaving my own thoughts and ideas diminished by AI-generated notes. I learned my lesson with copy-pasting which is very similar in that regard.
- Not for opinions or insights: In my humble opinion, AI lacks conviction (there’s no prompt for conviction 😉). My perspectives come from years of hands-on work in data engineering and from lessons learned from living life.
How AI Content Is Marked
If I have added an AI to a note, it’s always formatted as a quote and clearly stated, similar to this:
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Last updated April 2025.
