I'm Doubling Down on AI

I’ve been skeptical of AI for a long time - tired of the hype, the slop, and the talk about replacing developers. But as a one-person business, I can’t ignore its potential. In this episode, I break down why I’m doubling down on AI for the next few months: testing its limits, exploring real use cases, and seeing if it actually makes my life easier… or if I’ll end up saying I was right to be skeptical all along. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 What I don't like about AI culture
• 7:28 My new perspective on AI
• 12:13 What I'll be using it for
• 15:32 How I'm going to try using it as a dev (with caution)

Transcript

Don Hansen: 0:00

The next few months I'm going to double down on AI. So what does that mean and why am I doing it? If you've watched my content previously you've looked at my posts on LinkedIn, twitter, whatever you'll see that I'm pretty skeptical. I am very much an AI skeptic. I have genuinely been disappointed, given the amount of hype that I see for AI, and I've been snarky. I've been a little bit snarky, right, and I want to share why and then kind of what changed In the dev world.

Don Hansen: 0:34

There has been a big push for this belief that AI is going to replace a lot of developers, and I've seen a ton of people say that. But when I dig into who these people are, what positions they hold, a lot of them aren't developers. It's a lot of people that want to replace developers, whether they have a poor working relationship with developers, whether they're envious, you know. Sometimes it's just junior devs that just didn't really dive deep enough, they really didn't excel at the job search, they gave up and so they're just kind of miserable about it, right, and they're happy that developers are getting replaced. And then you have product managers that don't want to work with developers. You have folks who don't want to pay developers. Developers cost a lot of money, and so there are people genuinely excited about developers getting replaced or at least having to hire fewer developers or interact with fewer developers. And then there are some people that just quite frankly want to put the minimum effort possible to create amazing things that developers put a shitload of time into, to be able to build up the skills to do what they do, to create the architecture that they create, to be able to scale that and maintain that. And I understand it from kind of like an indie hacker, single person, business sort of perspective, right. But I think there has been a disrespect like just kind of like a vibe that I got, where people were genuinely disrespecting the amount of effort that went into really building up their craft, and I'm also worried that it promoted this idea where deep learning isn't as valuable because now we have AI.

Don Hansen: 2:32

There are a lot of things that bother me about this major push for AI replacing people who actually give a shit to build up their craft, and that genuinely makes me sad. But my algorithms are kind of screwed. It could just be what I'm shown, but I feel like just listening to other people in the tech industry, I feel like I'm not alone in this, so that really put me off. Um, it also enables indie hackers to create a lot of even shittier code that like like I don't care on the front end, but insecure code on the back end. When you have users paying users, that makes me sad for their users.

Don Hansen: 3:14

I don't like when people's data is compromised. It doesn't feel good when it happens to me, and I feel like I've just seen some indie hackers just not prioritize security enough. Right, there are a lot of serverless solutions that really could be leaned on and with an LM integrating stuff around the serverless solution. Also, while you do proper research to figure out what controls you want or what permissions you need to set to make a serverless solution secure, I've just seen so many indie hackers that just don't care about that. Right, as a developer, we've been really programmed to care about that and how important it is, and now we're kind of just enabling indie hackers to just continue to create bad habits with things like vibe coding. Right, I love indie hackers that really try to get code savvy, build fundamentals and use LLMs to kind of help them along. That is fantastic.

Don Hansen: 4:14

But you know when? I think we've all seen some of the results of vibe coding and it feels like developers are the only people that give a shit about that, and I'm also tired of AI founders that just continue to hype it up over and, over and over and over. More than what it is it's a tool. Different LMs are tools to solve different problems, and it feels like a lot of founders are just hyping it up to essentially gain investment money, and I've seen a lot of developers recognize the limitations, but it just feels like there's so many people that won't acknowledge the limitations and that's just irritating to see all the time. Why can't we just have an honest conversation about the tools that we're building and that we can use and what their capability is versus you know what their limitation is. Why can't we just have that conversation most of the time? No, it always has to transform into some inaccurate overhype or just like a tremendous amount of hate. I mean this goes from the opposite end. It's just like completely shitting on AI and saying it has no capability, no use case in the world. It's like this is just social media. I understand this, but we see this all day long. I don't know about you, but I cannot get it off my algorithm. With LinkedIn. You can make fun of me for using LinkedIn. I don't care. I have more followers on LinkedIn than I do Twitter. If I had more followers on Twitter, I'd use that more, but I cannot change my LinkedIn algorithm. It's just nonstop. Ai Speaking of which, everyone that continues to promote AI slop like.

Don Hansen: 6:03

I don't want to see a kitten go like, do a one on one with a shark in and win that fight. That's stupid. I don't want to see bunnies hopping on a trampoline. I don't want to see a cat fly into the outer space and just land on Mars before Elon Musk does. I don't care about that. I am so sick of ai slop.

Don Hansen: 6:27

Ai content I like. Whenever I come across it on youtube, I just cringe. I hate that. I. I like listening to humans. Is that such a weird thing? I like just feeling like I'm learning and connecting with other human beings and it doesn't feel soulless. I just I'm tired of the AI slot, right. So I had all this irritation built up because people have just been rabid about their obsession with the advancement of AI and it's just become an annoyance and deterred people from even seeing the real value of AI is is. I just feel like we can have more meaningful conversations. And I have you know me, just like shitting on AI is probably not contributing in a meaningful way either. But, um, anyways, I had to get past all that. It took me a while, it took me a long while, and so here's the reason why I wanted to just adopt this mindset to just like double down on AI for the next three months.

Don Hansen: 7:38

As a one person business, I have, like I've watched a ton of implementation videos of how different creators have used AI. Some, like I think you know, just creates AI slop. Some. That I think is very useful. Right, combining and augmenting what makes you great as a creator with AI can actually just accelerate your message getting out there. Right, as a one person business, it is just fantastic. It's really useful.

Don Hansen: 8:08

I can't pay a designer. I can't pay a developer to work with me. I can't pay a video editor. I don't have that kind of money. As it stands right now, I'm barely paying my bills. I am still at that point and this is kind of a dream I'm able to pay my bills with what I do. But, man, is it tough to grow. I feel like I keep hitting plateau after plateau after plateau, and, as I've been watching a ton of content creators use AI effectively, a ton of developers using AI effectively. I am truly missing out on everything using the right tool to finally push past some of these plateaus.

Don Hansen: 8:51

I am someone that likes variety. I like accomplishing a bunch of things. I learned a bunch of things. I'm reading a bunch of books all the time. I'm trying to grow in different ways and using tools to help me in different areas. With that, um will really save me a bunch of time, even just like editing down for shorts and stuff like that to be able to post on tiktok, youtube and instagram. I don't have the time to do that. I like I. I want to do course creation right now, I want to code right now and I want to create content right now. Those three things ai can help significantly with in different parts of that process, and I'm just not doing it.

Don Hansen: 9:29

I don't like I can't just like allow my hatred to prevent me from actually utilizing it to make my life easier, and I hope you guys are finding ways to make your life easier and able to accomplish a lot more with ai while still keeping the parts that you love about. You know, like diving into the craft that you love. Like. You can use it to supplement, you can use it to augment. Don't use it to replace the parts that you love, like that. That's the secret to ai and I I understand this secret has been out for a while. People have been shouting it but, like you are not the loudest people on the internet saying this. There's a lot more slop that people have to get through and I think people are just like kind of exhausted from a lot of the ai posts. To be honest, they just don't care. At this point it's like they're they're just gonna kind of be critical of it. They're just annoyed at it, and I'm seeing a lot of developers like this appropriately so. But this is the dev space.

Don Hansen: 10:27

Maybe I'm more cynical in my perspective of how devs are kind of taking AI, because maybe the people that I follow I don't know I could be biased with that but I've watched a ton of videos. I'm really impressed and, to be honest, I am fascinated by it. I really am Just going through or watching N8n workflows and like thinking about, well, maybe there are certain things I can code and customize, but like this idea of like automating so much that previous like tools couldn't quite automate. Um, they didn't really have like some of the reasoning to be able to, uh, have that flexibility that you need. Like I'm just fascinated by it. I like it's not a good purchase right now, but I'd love to buy like a 390 and just run like a gbt oss or something like that and see how it does with the gentic coding.

Don Hansen: 11:20

I'm just kind of curious, like I want to try stuff out and I want to see the limitations. I don't want to keep talking shit about AI without actually using it right and I feel like I've kind of just been a bystander. So I actually thoroughly want to test this. I want to become more knowledgeable about it and also I'm fascinated about it. I've gotten over my gripe with a lot of the AI slop on the internet and all the noise and I feel like I'm more focused on what I can use AI for for my own workflow and I am going to double down on it and I am going to use it in every possible way that I can and I want to see if it actually improves my life or not. I want to see if it improves my business and in three months maybe you see a video where I say I was wrong. Maybe you see a video where I say I was wrong. Ai is complete shit. Maybe I do that, but I want to try it. So just a few ways that I'm going to use AI. And you know, this might not apply to you If you're a content creator or dev or like one person just trying to run a business. This might apply to you, but I mean, there are a ton of ways you can use it.

Don Hansen: 12:27

I want to aggregate a bunch of tech news articles. I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to keep up with stuff and I don't really create content around it, but I like I consume a lot and I try to keep up in the tech industry and relevant areas that I care about or that I think I should care about in three months or six months. I think if I had a tool to be able to aggregate that and summarize some certain things, I would feel better and more confident with utilizing my time to create content around it and talk about it. And I kind of want to aggregate a bunch of questions like the biggest concerns, the biggest common gripes from junior developers. To be honest, most developers are not building the skill that they need to to be competitive. Like I, I kind of know the question, so I don't really dive into it, but I think it's still important to have like a consensus of like where junior developers are at, and, as I've kind of like pulled away, um, from creating content lately, I've kind of lost touch of that. I still mentor people, I still talk to junior developers, but not in the capacity that I used to. So I feel like I can use a tool to aggregate a bunch of data that is just going to keep me up to date without me putting in a lot of time to be able to do that.

Don Hansen: 13:43

Right, that's an easy use case for AI and repurposing my content. Like I kind of just like ranting I have a list right here, um, I'm fine with that, but I don't want to create a blog post from it. I don't want to create like shorts from it and like posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, and like I don't have time to do all that, there's no reason not to use AI to repurpose my content. What I want to do is figure out a way for it to truly utilize my voice and any content that's created. It sounds like it came just for me. I'm going to approve all of it. I'm going to create my own custom content without AI you won't know if it comes for me or AI. I want to be able to utilize AI in the right way to create a lot more valuable insight and information for people.

Don Hansen: 14:36

I don't post anything. I'm fucking lazy. I feel like there's so much content I could be pushing out there and I just don't have the time because I keep diving into so much that I'm curious about and I'm interested about. Have the time because I keep diving into so much that is I'm curious about and I'm interested about, and so now I have more time to dive into that stuff and I can kind of just talk about it in a video and then I don't have to worry about all the repurposing. I just don't want to repurpose. It's, it's a pain. I don't want to do it. But also I'm creating courses now. Um, I don't know when this course is going to be released, but the nest nest course for Scribble should be live pretty soon and then I'm going on to other courses. Uh, but I like AI was fantastic for auditing my course. Um, it's auditing kind of a new course that I'm building as well, and I don't want it to build my course content, I want it to check it. It can automate a bunch and there's way more than I'm going to utilize it for, and I'll talk more about it and see how it goes.

Don Hansen: 15:31

But another thing is coding. Now, I have been so critical of using AI for coding again because I just keep seeing, well, this is where, like, I'm seeing developers like good developers that are starting to like just admit that their skills are atrophying because they're overusing AI. It's a, it's addictive, it actually, with targeted prompts, um, in like proper context being set up and just limited scope, it can do it. Just, I think I need to test this, but it I think it could do really well with flushing out features at a much faster pace. And I think there's this battle developers have, where they have to limit their use. They have to be careful about their dependency. They have to really think about how they're going to utilize ai so they don't their skills don't start atrophying. That's a real concern and this isn't just the dev world. A lot of people need to realize this, like we all. All the different parts of your mind just look at it, like different muscles that are really good at different tasks. When you don't utilize the muscle, you let it atrophy because you're outsourcing that critical thinking to AI. That muscle atrophies. You need to use it right.

Don Hansen: 16:47

So I want to experiment with having. I want to see what, like cursor and different models can do. I want it to build out a feature I want to lay out like different conventions. So I'm building applications in Nest and Angular right now and I have my own CSS conventions I wanted to follow and I want to see if I can outline things perfectly, prompt it perfectly and keep the scope small enough so it can start building out features. And I want to see what it produces. I want to see what different LLMs produce. I want to see if it speeds it up. Then eventually maybe I can like trigger some background tasks for it to build some stuff while I'm building my stuff, but I like part of the week I want to also code without it, right? I want to find that perfect balance where I feel like I'm still growing as a developer and my skills aren't definitely skills aren't atrophying, right.

Don Hansen: 17:41

I want to test this out instead of just shitting on people creating an over-dependence for AI and again, I do that. It's not like shitting on the person, instead of just shitting on people, creating an over dependence for ai and again I do that. It's not like shitting on the person, it's shitting on the idea that we should create this over reliance for ai. That's the danger. And like people just don't acknowledge it, or if they acknowledge it, they're like, yeah, it could happen, but like it makes me faster and you know, my product manager wants me to get this feature out faster or like and that's the big concern, right, as developers, we've always had to push back.

Don Hansen: 18:10

Just even with code quality, even with reducing technical debt, we've always had to push back. We've had to slow it down a bit, we've had to overestimate and all we're doing is making worse conditions for ourselves to basically have to follow unrealistic expectations, unless you create an unrealistic dependency on AI. And that really worries me the most, because I know how stressful being a dev can be and I'm thankful that I can just build my own stuff now and I don't have to build someone else's dream up. I'm very grateful for that. But you know, a lot of people are developers that work very hard and they put in a lot of hours and I'm friends with them and I genuinely feel sad to see good developers that have really good intentions and want to do good for their company just continue to burn themselves out because those expectations continue to increase and increase and increase because developers let that happen. I know it's not always easy to push back with that stuff, but man does AI create a really interesting and dangerous scenario for developers in the future if we don't start being more critical about how we use it in our workflow. So those are some of my thoughts.

Don Hansen: 19:33

I genuinely am just fascinated with seeing what I can use AI for and I want to talk about that experience. I want to share how it goes. I want to share what I think about it, what I hate about it, and maybe kind of just develop a new perspective for AI, because I think the future of good conversation around AI is utilizing it in a way again that augments our ability, that just increases it, or it supplements some of our weaknesses that we don't really need to get stronger in necessarily. Like I just don't care to memorize regex I never will. I just don't care about it.

Don Hansen: 20:17

Right, I've used tools to be able to generate that all the time. Hey, I can generate that for me and I think that's a good use case for it, but I'm getting off track. Anyways, I'm going to kind of dive into it. I want to learn a lot more about LLMs. I actually Scrum has a really interesting AI engineer track that I think I'm going to go through. Right. We're affiliated with them. Might as well check it out, and it's actually a lot deeper than I thought. And kind of just setting up a workflow and memory and a ton of stuff I don't even know about with LLMs sounds fascinating. So I'm going to actually learn a hell of a lot more than I know now and maybe I won't just be talking out of my ass.