My Thoughts on AI, No Seriously...

I have been in this industry long enough to watch every new “next big thing” show up. Marketing departments grab onto it, executives sometimes force it into the business whether it fits or not.

I resisted AI at first. I still see the many downsides, and I do not think we will understand the full impact of this technology for years.

Now that I have some time, I started digging into AI to better understand the advantages and disadvantages it actually brings to the table.

That being said, I am fine with AI as long as it stays “over there,” contained in my browser. I am not sold on agentic AI. Recent vulnerabilities in tools like Copilot show that the expanded attack surface they introduce, both for individuals and enterprises, is not worth the risk. And we are still very early in this space. There are many more issues like this to come, including ones we cannot even think of yet.

On the enterprise side, I can see real value in pattern recognition, limited self healing of services, and automated infrastructure scaling. The irony is that all of those capabilities have been actively developed for years without AI ever being part of the conversation.

ChatGPT is my AI weapon of choice at the moment. I have found that because of my wide skill set, I am able to get solid, repeatable, fast results across a large variety of tasks. Having been in this industry as long as I have, I am not big on any product that can be used as a “crutch.” However, at least for me, it has proven to be a force multiplier.

There is a massive amount of AI slop out there, but AI itself is just a tool. It only does what you ask it to do. If your standards are low and you do not have clear expectations, the results will be low too, no matter what tool you use.

There is nothing on this site that I have not vetted and deployed myself using the posts I create.

The key here is quality. You need the perspective to recognize what quality actually looks like before you can achieve it. I do not care which AI you use. Quality only comes from the experience of the person setting the guardrails and keeping them on target. Everything that comes back from your prompts should be treated with healthy skepticism, not full acceptance.

I also think AI has changed how I search for information. Before AI, I spent hours digging through documentation, forums, mailing lists, bug reports, and anything else I could find. Most of that time was spent widening the search, just trying to uncover a small nugget that would point me in the general direction of the answer I was actually after.

Using AI, you are basically writing explicit technical emails all day, constantly trying to prevent drift. You end up in a documentation first workflow. Documentation first was always a project management objective, but the reality usually played out differently. You would take notes and tell yourself you would come back to it later. Sometimes you would get to test things end to end, and sometimes you would just fulfill the documented checkbox.

I am a hands-on type of person. I deploy the thing before I fully understand the thing. That is how I learn. I break it, recover it, and come to understand the system through the process. I also have a creative side that has been with me for years through graphic design, web design, and sign work. The challenge has always been switching from deep technical concentration into creative mode.

Gen AI changed that for me. It allows me to be a team of one. I can troubleshoot complex infrastructure and then immediately pivot into creating something visual without losing focus. AI acts like a supercharger for skills I already developed the long and difficult way. I know what questions to ask. I know what the end result should look like. I also know when AI starts giving me nonsense.

At this point, it feels like a disadvantage to work without it.

There is another side to this. AI amplifies someone like me, someone who has worked across multiple disciplines and learned the hard way by getting into the weeds and parsing logs with my own eyes. Over the long term, though, I think it may also push some people into a narrow box. It could encourage a generation of button pushers who never really learn how things truly work, only how to request an output. If that happens, people with a complete end to end understanding of systems may become less common.

AI is an incredible tool . It multiplies what you can do, but it can easily become a crutch.

I am not against AI. I am simply pragmatic about it. It helps me build faster than ever, but it also forces me to think about the kind of future we are creating, who will be expected to maintain it, and who will actually understand the systems we depend on when they break.

In the meantime, I am becoming friends with our new overlords 😬

Thanks for reading! -Christian