The Importance of Trying AI

From what I see the aim of AI companies is not to provide human beings with great tools to speed up work flows, to automate menial tasks, and to enhance our daily work lives. It is to replace us. For this reason I don’t like that there is so much hype about AI.

Listening to the Keen

At the same time as I write this I have been to half a dozen, if not a dozen talks about Vibe coding, AI workflows, MCPs, Agents and more. I have also played with Claude, with Le Chat, with MyAI and many other products. I have played with it to correct my french grammar and more.

By listening to those who are keen on AI you will be presented with use cases and ideas that could be beneficial to you and your projects, without having to invest the time and money yourself.

Personal Experimentation

I played with it to create an Instagram clone in about 22 lines of PHP and more. Today, on Bluesky, I saw someone say that he has never played with AI. People then chimed in with "neither have I" and the cheerleaders started to flaunt their lack of curiousity and experimentation.

AI can simply be a conversation tool but it can help with coaching and learning. Sometimes you read instructions related to using docker or some other technology but you don’t understand the instructions, and you can’t achieve what you want to achieve.

If you provide an AI client with the latest instructions, and then tell it in plain language, what you want to do, then AI will help you with your specific challenge, usually within a few seconds, rather than a few hours or days.

Instead of getting stuck, and giving up, you achieve your goal.

Behind the Scenes on Popular Apps

Immich, Nextcloud and Photoprism all use machine learning to speed up face recognition and photo cataloguing. If I was to go through 50,000 photos by hand, to tag them with "landscape", "bicycle", "train", "mountains", "shopping centre" and more, it would take weeks, or months. With machine learning/AI the process still takes time, but it is automated and takes place in the background and I can focus on more useful tasks. If you’re using open source tools there is a good chance that somewhere, behind the scenes you are using AI without realising it.

AI to Assist, Not to Replace

Recently I saw an article about someone wanting to create a podcast content farm, where for one dollar per podcast they would create thousands of programs. A few years ago that would have been called a spam factory. In the age of blogs such a practice was looked down on, and those guilty of such desires would be marked as spammers, and google would ignore them.

Vibe Coding and Existing Apps

One thing that I thought about, months ago, is about vibe coding and existing apps. If someone decided to vibe code a ToDo lists app then they are creating something that already exists, where we already have too much choice. I also worry that with the lakes of cooling water, and hours of solar power used, that the carbon footprint of re-creating apps that already exists will be huge.

I worry that, instead of looking through, and finding a free and open source tool, people will reflexively go to AI, to recreate something that already exists and does the job well.

And Finally

Artificial Intelligence should help people streamline their workflow. If we write, and then get AI, or other tools to check that what we wrote makes sene, then it is a great tool. If we use AI to help us find a solution that works, then it is a good thing.

If it replaces people then it is awful, and we are right not to look forward to AI replacing humans, and humanity. In this context I am thinking of empathy and sympathy.

And finally, understanding how AI tools work, and how to write good prompts is a skill that is learned through practice over time. If we do not play with AI, within the free tiers, then we fall behind. Those that refuse to play with AI are falling behind those that do not. We can experiment with a lot of tools for free.

Experimentation has an environmental impact, but we can attempt to use tools that have less of an impact.