My Personal Policy on AI Use

The technology isn't inherently bad, it's actually quite cool. My problem is that I have almost no control over how it's used at scale - economically, environmentally, or against artists - and the only lever I actually hold is my own usage. So this document describes the one thing I control.

The two things I'm protecting:

1. My craft: Software engineering is my career and my passion. Losing the ability to build unaided would be losing more than the skill, I'd be losing what has captivated me since I was five years old.
2. My honesty: People form beliefs about what I can do based on what I ship. I won't let those beliefs be false.

These sometimes conflict with a third thing I want which is to execute on my ideas quickly. That conflict is the point of writing all of this down and formalizing it. Maybe you feel similarly to me, and you can follow these as well.

Hard Rules

If I'm arguing with one of these, that's a signal I'm doing a big thing badly:

• I don't ship code or content I couldn't have written and can't explain. Not "roughly understand" - explain, line by line, including why it's structured that way and what breaks it. This is important in all code, but should be critical and non-negotiable in production systems.
• I don't publish a whole generated creative work. No generated videos. No fully generated thumbnails. No essay, script, or narration that I didn't write.
• I don't use generation to replace someone I'd otherwise have paid, commissioned, or credited. If the alternative to generating it was hiring an artist, I hire the artist, I do it myself, or I do without.
• I don't generate music or video. Cost per second of output - in terms of computation and literal money - is indefensible for what I get out of it.
• I don't let it write the parts that are supposed to be me - the opinions, the argument, the "here's why I did it this way." Those are the whole reason anyone reads the writeup.

Mediums

• Text - see "writing" and "coding" below but, yes, in general I view this as okay so long as it abides by spirit of the laws set here.
• Images - never for art, and never for full products. For example, on the iPad Touchscreen thumbnail, I couldn't find a hand with an outstretched finger I liked online, so I used Imagen for it. The rest of the thumbnail was composed in Blender. To me, that's okay. If I generated the whole thumbnail, that's not okay.
• Music and Video - no. It's hardly ever worth it.

Coding Projects

It's effectively required at work, and refusing wouldn't help anyone. The risk here isn't using it, it's the review muscle going soft and shipping garbage which, in any production system that people rely on is wrong and dangerous.

• Read every line I commit as if a junior wrote it and I'm accountable for it. Because I am.
• If I can't review it properly, I'm not qualified to ship it - same standard as any other code.
• Notice if I've stopped forming an opinion before asking.

Personal coding projects are an extension of this idea and are where sliding into an LLM-assisted stupor is scarier:

• If the project exists because a problem is interesting, I solve that problem myself. Everything around it - scaffolding, config, boilerplate, glue, tests - is fair game.

Writing

• Not for writing. Review is okay, but pay attention to the slippery slope between "review" and "rewrite" because that's basically the same as writing it for me.
• If the output contains a sentence I wouldn't have written, I don't paste it - I figure out what it noticed and write my own version if I like the idea.
• Narration is me. Non-negotiable.

Honesty

Always disclose when you were helped. Being honest about how you built a project is important.

I'll come back and revisit this later, but I think this is a good start as I formulate my feelings around this rapidly evolving and controversial topic.