Time, effort, and skill being equal, I would suggest that AI access generally improves the quality of any given output. The issue is that AI use is only externally identifiable when at least one of those inputs is low, which makes it easy to develop poor heuristics.
No one finds AI-assisted prose/code/ideas boring, per se. They find bad prose/code/ideas boring. "AI makes you boring" is this generation's version of complaining about typing or cellular phones. AI is just a tool; it's up to humans how to use it.
This reminds me of the time I printed a poster with a blown up version of some image for a high school history project. A classmate asked how I did it, so I started going on about how I used software to vectorize the image. Turned out he didn't care about any of that and just wanted the name of the print shop.
It's high-interest to me because open models are the ultimate backstop. If the SOTA hosted models all suddenly blow up or ban me, open models mitigate the consequence from "catastrophe" to "no more than six to nine months of regression". The idea that I could run a ~GPT-5-class model on my own hardware (given sufficient capex) or cloud hardware under my control is awesome.
YMMV, but I've found that I actually do way more of that type of "thinking hard" thanks to LLMs. With the menial parts largely off my plate, my attention has been freed up to focus on a higher density of hard problems, which I find a lot more enjoyable.
Yup, there is a surprisingly high amount of boilerplate in programming, and LLMs definitely can remove this and let you focus on the more important problems. For a person with a day job, working on side projects actually became fun with LLMs again, even with the limitation of free time and mental energy to invest in.
The way I summed it up to a friend recently is that Gemini 3 is smarter but Grok 4 works harder. Very loose approximation, but roughly maps to my experience. Both are extremely useful (as is GPT-5.2), but I use them on different tasks and sometimes need to manage them a bit differently.
After a certain point, someone else's insistence on self-harm ceases to be a good excuse to infringe on my freedom. We don't ban hammers because some people accidentally damage their property/body, and it's a lot easier to do that with a hammer than an unlocked bootloader.
I'd also add that I just don't like the idea in principle that I should have to trust the agent not to act maliciously. If an agent can run rm -rf / in an extreme edge case, theoretically it could also execute a container escape.
Maybe vanishingly unlikely in practice, but it costs me almost nothing to use a VM just in case. It's not impossible that certain models turn out to be poorly behaved, that attackers successfully execute indirect prompt injection via malicious tutorials targeting coding agents, or that some shadowy figure runs a plausibly deniable attack against me through an LLM API.
I called this outcome the second I saw the title of the post the other day. Granted, I have some experience in that area, as someone who once upon a time had the brilliant idea to launch a product on HN called "Napster.fm".
Here's a trivial example: https://supremecommander.ai. A raw CSS implementation of my blog's logo would have been a pain to build and maintain, but with Astro the code is relatively straightforward JS that becomes pure HTML/CSS at build-time.
The other nice thing is that you can throw all kinds of preexisting components from React/whatever into your site, and it will ship zero JS to the client until you explicitly flag a specific JS resource as an "island".
The only special thing about "islands" is that they're an escape hatch from the default behavior of JS being strictly build-time-evaluated. I found the terminology and description a little confusing at first too, because it makes it sound more special than it is. But the concept makes sense when you understand the context of Astro's intentional default behavior.
Good to know, thanks! I can't reproduce that on Android (and it's especially weird since the site has almost no JS), but I'll investigate and try to figure it out.
lol, well I'd appreciate the heads up even if it were meant to be aggressive, but thanks. Should be good now; the issue was most likely a CSS animation causing your browser tab to crash, so now it'll just turn off the animation whenever the page is quickly reloaded twice in a row.
No one finds AI-assisted prose/code/ideas boring, per se. They find bad prose/code/ideas boring. "AI makes you boring" is this generation's version of complaining about typing or cellular phones. AI is just a tool; it's up to humans how to use it.
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