Artificial Intelligence

It didn’t take long for me to slip. “I built…” Pause. “Claude built…” I don’t remember exactly when it first happened, but it’s happened many times since. I’m not ashamed to admit when I’ve been helped by AI, but I find myself tripping over my words when I describe my work with it. Just now, I wrote and then deleted “our work.”

I am deeply suspicious of anthropomorphizing LLMs too much. I do not dwell on questions like “is ChatGPT conscious?” Still, I can’t bring myself to treat them like tools the way I do my text editor (NeoVim, btw). I say “please” and “thank you” when talking to them. I also feel suspicious of claiming too much credit for the code they write. Though they do not write code without human instruction, however abstracted that instruction is from fleshy fingers touching a keyboard or a fleshy brain choosing every character, it seems wrong to say that I built something when they produced the code. Like I’m changing the meaning of the word “build” to puff myself up.

I’ve found myself unemployed with a bit more free time than usual for the last few months, and I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to learn a bit about LLM tool use and to try out this whole “vibe coding” thing. Inspired in part by one blog post by Thomas Ptacek saying I was nuts not to use LLMs more and another by Thorsten Ball explaining the nuts and bolts of “agents”, I set out to make one with the right ergonomics and features just for me - a CLI application I could run in tmux beside my NeoVim pane while editing code.