2025-08-12 -- Motivation for using AI -- or a lack thereof
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I recently talked to one of our senior devs about AI tools. He was
pretty enthusiastic about it and recommended that I'd try them. And then
he mentioned one very important point:
"It helps you do the stuff that you don't want to do!"
This never occured to me before. This was an eye-opener.
There are very few tasks that I would consider a chore, at least not in
this sense. I don't get frustrated or bored by *what* I do, but by *how*
I have to do it.
I enjoy writing documentation, for example, but don't make me do it us-
ing some subpar program. I'm good at using a ticketing system and at or-
ganizing stuff (while other people actually hate writing down their
progress as a comment in a ticket), but I get bummed out really quickly
if said system is a slow and clunky web tool. Editing lots of files at
once and making the same change over and over quickly turns into a chal-
lenge for me: "How could I solve this using grep or Vim macros?" And
since I do that often, I'm already good at it.
AI can't help me with any of that and even if it could, this would be
the wrong approach. I don't want to work around a bad documentation tool
-- I want a better tool, because I know that it exists.
I adopt new tools pretty quickly if they actually do help me. That's
just not the case with the current AI hype, because all these things try
to solve "problems" that I don't perceive as problems.
