Long ago and far away. And unforgettable. July 2005
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Claude helped me build a thing. There, I’ve admitted it, not that my use of LLMs has ever been a secret. But this was a big thing, a thing I could not have done on my own. I know because I tried, some years ago, and even with good help failed. Then I thought, I know what I want and I know how to break the overall task down into chunks and I know how to check that each chunk works the way I want it to before moving on. So I bought into a month of Claude.
I also took the trouble to read a bit about best practices and learned the importance of planning before coding and of clearing the context fairly often. So I sat down and wrote an overall plan for the project. I wrote a couple of rules to work by. And a little more than a week ago, Claude started work with me as project manager. We did less than an hour a day.
It went brilliantly.
There were times when Claude uncovered problems I had not anticipated. And there were times when I was able to suggest better ways to fix things. Each session started with reading my notes and Claude’s progress reports and ended with writing a new progress report and writing up my ideas for the next step.
So what’s the problem?
“AI” has become such a divisive topic, with some people hating any and every use of it and others embracing it for stuff that they have no business handing off. As my cyber-chum John says, there is this Buddhist thing known as the third way. I have embraced that, and take it to mean that you should use it to help you do things that you perhaps could manage on your own, but that would take too long to be worthwhile.
That’s how I feel about this project. Time was, I could and did write passable PHP if I had to. But that time was a while ago and I have not kept up with modern PHP. So I was happy to use generative AI to extend my capabilities. I’ve never used it to do anything to my writing, because writing is what I do. It may sound arrogant, but I feel my skills as a (hated term) wordsmith are quite good, thank you. With computer code, I can use the help, so I availed myself of it.
Looking back, I might have been able to manage the coding on my own, but it would have taken a painfully long time and I would have been a terrible nag on forums and the like. However, I almost certainly would not have been able to diagnose, let alone fix, the problem that arose when I moved from development to production. Claude did, quickly and effectively.
And that, as I see it, is the essence of the third way. Use it, thoughtfully, when that use is appropriate. There are plenty of areas in which I feel that AI could never be appropriate. My own peeve is dumb illustrations in newsletters and the like that do no more than add an illustration, one which adds literally nothing to the text. But if an artist wants to write with it, fair enough. Neither a blanket ban nor unthinking adoration are wise.
And what’s the thing?
A plugin for the Grav CMS that runs this site, to let me receive and display webmentions. Before, I relied on the kindness of strangers, and grateful I was, but this gives me independence and a bit more control and in doing so will free up a place for someone else to take. So if this piece, or any other, sends you rushing to your keyboard to excoriate me for my utter foolishness or praise my unwavering honesty, go ahead. Your words will appear below, if you want them to.
I should note that I will not be making the code public as I know I would not be able to maintain it for any users other than myself. But if you want it ...
Comments
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Hey, it's useful for dev tasks in small doses. Fully relying on it to make a thing is the problem and sadly, that's where the majority of its use comes from.
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I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I can’t stand the LLMs and the companies behind them, on the other hand I used one to debug a network problem and it was excellent at it. Anything I need an opinion for, they can die in a fire. But a local coding model is probably the optimum solution.
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A year ago I read Libraries of the Mind by William Marx, and some of it is still very much on my mind ever since. Particularly what William Marx called ‘dark matter’ literature, which exists but you don’t have access to. E.g. because it’s in a language you can’t read, or material you don’t know how to search for. Material that is invisible from your own viewing position. Because that invisibility is easily accepted as proof of absence of such material, rather than proof of limitations on your own toolset and agency preventing you to find it, such resources will be generally ignored.
Still, many questions have global aspects. Our networks, our trade routes, our dependencies are truly global. Because of it many of our issues, including climate emergencies, are global in both their roots and consequences. We all suffer from small earth syndrome these days, as I phrased it in 2010 at the SHiFT Conference, where everything anyone of us does reverberates around the world because we are continuously bumping into real global limits, Club of Rome style.
The same is true in reverse: many of the pathways to agency, to resolution and mitigation are global in nature too, or at the very least need us to look at available information, thinking, and perspectives globally as well.
‘Global’ therefore is not to be taken here as a level of abstraction or aggregation, which erodes your own place in it and throws out your own localised experience and stories, but global in the scope you yourself default to when it comes to who you see as part of the whole, as worthy of consideration and/or empathy, as affected by your choices and actions. Global also not as an equaliser or one-size-fits-all thing, unmooring identities e.g., but using differences as an energy source and as potential for creativity. In any situation there are boundaries between groups and narratives. Power differences, and identities resting on opposing or similar assumptions, differences in who has legitimacy or standing in which situations and issues, differences in who has or is afforded agency and in which ways, all abound. All these differences are potential energy to tap into.Put together it spells to me that when I am doing some deskresearch shining a better light on literary ‘dark matter’ becomes much more important. Are there any francophone resources, Nordic authors, Eastern European authors, hispanic movements around an issue I am exploring? Yes, the scientific world largely uses English as lingua franca, but language areas also have their own spheres outside of it. Look in any French or German book store for instance and compare the shelves on topics of your interest to e.g. a UK book store. They also all have their own scientific publishing channels. That is all still within a largely overlapping European context. What about ongoing Chinese perspectives, Southern-American movements, the various spheres of discussion on the African continent, and across Asia? Those will be almost completely invisible to me on any topic, when my own tools are limited to my personal language skills and the general anglo-american bias in online search tools.
Enter AI tools as a middle way, along the lines of what Jeremy Cherfas wrote recently. He posits his own AI use for “things that you perhaps could manage on your own, but that would take too long to be worthwhile.” And while “there are plenty of areas in which I feel that AI could never be appropriate” he “was happy to use generative AI to extend my capabilities” where that strengthened his own efforts andv where outputs are for his personal or intermediate use in his own work processes.
When I ask e.g. Claude about a book and its message, and to help build a more syntopic reading list around something, what you get is a few English titles, as would be expected given their origin. Adding my own language skills, it will add a few other resources. Any extension beyond that you need to directly ask about: is there anything in e.g. Nordic countries, are there traces of similar discourse in China etc.? In steps what will emerge is a fuller list of pointers. Many of those I won’t be able to read directly, but I can circle around them, e.g. through secondary sources, by machine translating parts etc. I’ve noticed that to do this, to go beyond middle of the road AI responses, I need to build it up, in steps. Which is something I can put together as a recipe and feed into Claude.
I won’t speak or read Chinese, Igbo, Swedish or Polish in my lifetime. But I can ferret out resources and what they may tell me this way.
Today I started reading in Rest Is Resistance by US author Tricia Hersey, it was mentioned to me recently in the context of maintaining hope or optimism while also feeling dread and despair about the state and direction of the world, alongside Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, and the Dutch title ‘Optimism without hope’ by Tommy Wieringa. Turned out I already bought it in 2023. I wondered about other similar or adjacent texts and used Claude in the way described above. First came a list of mostly English resources, and one German, most of which I was already aware of. Then following up a handful of francophone resources, nordic ones, and hispanic ones came up, which unearthed a link to Latin-American texts I had already explored a few years back related to a local legal initiative in the Netherlands w.r.t. climate adaptation. It struggled with providing pointers to resources from the African continent, but ultimately did. Further prompting brought both official and grass roots perspectives from China, more francophone resources from the Caribbean world, and also more potentially relevant African and Indian resources.
A first approximation of a syntopic approach like this is no output in itself, but a starting point, meaning I now have more to do than if I had been satisfied with just the titles I already own or am already aware of. But I am casting a wider net, even if what the net brought up may not all be equally useful, it pushed me to look further and broader. It stretches my Library of the Mind.
The University of Maastricht Library, which I walked by a week ago. Its collection limited by necessity, like our global digital library is limited by our tooling. -
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