Five or six years ago I had a lot of fun with Gwern’s project This Waifu Does Not Exist. I showed it to friends and churnined through dozens of crappy anime girls. Further in the past, I spent a few hours messing with AI Dungeon (long before it became the clanker erotica nightmare it is today). But I don’t use LLMs to code, and I find it somewhat bizarre that everyone else does. The reason is simple: I want to have control over my tools and the projects I make. I want to be able to work even if I’m using a $109 Chromebook flashed with Mr Chromebox UEFI firmware that runs Void Linux while living off-grid in a tent. (Hypothetically…) It’s the same reason I don’t use proprietary game engines or IDEs, but with costs raised exponentially; I’m not sure if there is a reward great enough for me to pay $200 a month to require either a beefy model machine or an internet connection to type some text.

I find it bizarre that “AI” is reviled in every other creative field, but almost ubiquitously accepted in coding. There are a few projects that are explicitly against LLM use, e.g. Zig, but they are extreme outliers. Coding is an art with personal expression like any other, I don’t see the difference between slop drawing, slop prose, and slop code. I’m not even on board with most moral arguments against AI, I just see that it is ruining everything I like about the world.