This is my first blog post in decades, and it feels strange to write that. The last time I maintained a blog I was a young teenager running a GeoCities site dedicated to video games (mostly Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross). The world has moved on pretty severely since then. Even now I’m writing this in Markdown with a static site generator (Hugo) - tools that would have seemed very strange to my thirteen-year-old self.
For all the tools and technological changes that have come and gone since my adolescence, nothing has so clearly delineated a “then vs now” like the arrival of LLMs. They’ve changed everything. Content generation has been commoditized and delegated to machines - Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, all of them filled to the brim with posts of machine origin. I’m excited about the technology, but I’m also disappointed by the current state of usuage in practice. That’s probably how it always goes; a younger me would have been just as surprised by how obsessed we became with social media in the 2010s. Many times in life I’ve tried to imagine a future world and have been consistently wrong about how it actually turned out.
This blog is mostly for human-generated writing. In this post-LLM world, I see a new importance in creating work that wasn’t generated by a machine. If everyone makes content via LLMs, which are then trained on that same content, it creates a degenerative effect for both the models and society. Some people call this the “dead internet theory” - a future where the internet is just bots talking to bots. We have to create spaces for human creativity if we want to preserve what is human.
I’ve lived through a few eras of the tech industry at this point. I’ve worked at scrappy startups, started my own VC-funded company, and spent time at larger public companies. Along the way I’ve picked up a few things worth saying.
This blog is my attempt to write from that perspective: as a builder, a thinker, and someone who enjoys the art in making software.
More soon.