AI: What I do and don't use AI for

Dated, August 28, 2025

I do want to track this as an ongoing thought, as I think this will evolve quickly and so will opinions around it.

If you don't care about my opinions and just want to know how I use it, jump to "How This Site Uses AI" at the bottom.

AI has become a hot topic for both good and bad reasons. I felt this needed to be my first slashpage. I feel most people at this point, have hard stances in two opposite corners, where it's the greatest advance in human technology or it's going to ruin the world. I think either way, we can all agree there are too many AI generated memes out on the internet now... I feel like I sit somewhere in the middle of the arguement.

I do also believe it came to be in a very unethical way (thinking of the stories around scraping information to train models), it still tends to operate in a very sketchy way (In my opinion at least, thinking around copyright laws and artists, etc.)

I do feel AI can do a lot to change the world in a positive way. The way it can accelerate business, coming from a technology and security stand point, it opens a lot of opportunity for immense growth. It also brings technology back into the hands of an individual if done correctly.

Personal

I use it for many things. I also do try to limit the amount of money I contribute to the big open corporate world when it comes to AI. This is how I try to balance the items listed above. I do want to see, open source rule this space of technolgy. I do also worry we are in another economic bubble around AI, but I am not economicist.

My personal stack consists of the following:

I don't forsee that changing, as I don't feel like I will need to change it. I use AI to augment what I do. I use AI to accelerate what I do personally. I don't use AI to tell me stories, or generate content. I have (and will note) that I use AI to generate filler content, but, even then, I note it and limit it.

Some of the projects, I currently have around AI, are attempts to improve my day to day life. The one example project, I like to share is how I use AI in my email filtering. I get a lot of emails and want to manage them better. I have OpenAI (gpt-4.1-mini) filter my emails into category based on the sender and subject. It then gives out a confidence level, and processes it a certain way. If by any level, it defines it at personal, it will just notify me of an email. If it is a newsletter, receipt, or shipping notice as an example, it will be processed and sent to me in summary. I will also receive any unsubscription links in any of these emails.

I have started playing around with migrating to fully self hosted models and I believe I am close. The Jetson can whip through 6b and lower models, while still handling 14-16b models as well.

Professional

I feel fortunately to work something that thinks through these types of decisions. AI has become a part of my professional life. I feel like we are thinking about it the correct way and have the right concerns when looking into how we can use it and where. From a product perspective, we do want to improve how people use AI which I think will be very beneficial to the industry.

I earlier hot take, is that AI will help businesses do business better.

Where AI has helped me most professional is around notes. In my role, understanding and remember history goes a long way. We have ways - and are still looking to improve - to take notes and get summaries based on the conversations as one example. In the near future, we will be able to connect those calls and really contextualize a summary with historical reference.

For day to day tasks, I use a similar stack as above, minus the Jetson. I don't suspect that will change. I use[d] Replit for research and will most likely continue to do so.

How This Site Uses AI

Based on my 'Personal' section, you may be able to guess how I use AI. I do also (at least try) to make it pretty clear when I do.

I use AI to generate code. I would say this site was built with AI assistance. I tend to use AI to build boilerplates, templates, regular, expressions, etc. I don't use it to "build a site". In my posts, you will see AI assisted code. I would not say it is fully AI generated, as I tend to use it as a building block.

I do not use AI for the creative content (writing, drawing, etc) - minus one exception - I use AI to create descriptions of my watches with a Vision model. I may change that out as I am not sure how I like the layout of those pages; nor, do I feel they require text.

There are no AI generated images on this site. I also plan to keep it that way, unless, I explictly do a post around "AI image generation" etc. As for personal content, even the cards used in social media. Those are scripted using real images and not generated by AI. I should write a post on that to help people. Noted!

Final Thoughts

I do think the potential here is high. I do also think humanity has done a great job at taking generational discoveries and absolutely ruining the crap out of them. I hope that the beginning of "Generative AI" is simply a dark spot on what it holds in the future, but, based on my previous point, I won't be holding my breath. I just plan to do my best, to make this a good thing for everyone.