For a couple of years I treated everything I put online like a deliverable. Clean, finished, impersonal — the professional version, sanded down until it could’ve lived on anyone’s About page. Then AI got good enough to make exactly that, instantly, for free, forever.
That changed how I decided to ration my energy. When a machine can produce infinite competent, faceless content, the faceless part stops being the safe choice. The scarce thing now is a person — a specific one, with specific taste, specific opinions, and an actual reason for making the thing.
I’m not anti-AI, for the record. I lead automation and AI work in my day job, and I reach for it deliberately when it’s the right tool1 — it’s genuinely good at the parts of engineering that are mostly typing. What I won’t hand off is the judgment, the taste, or the why. That’s the job, not the overhead. (I still won’t touch it for art. That line hasn’t moved — like the em dash, a hill I’ll die on.)
So I’m doing the less efficient thing on purpose. Writing here again, in my own voice. Putting the sketch next to the final. Crediting the people I learn from instead of laundering their work into a brand.
Community doesn’t come from parading a finished version of yourself at people. It comes from being transparent — letting them see the process, the taste, the occasional thing that didn’t work, and the actual person behind all of it.
Closed-off and polished was always the safe play. It was never the interesting one, and it’s about to be the cheap one too. So: more personal, more often. I’m going to venture a guess that it’s making a comeback.
Footnotes
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And it is just that, a tool — multifaceted, sure, but a tool nonetheless. ↩