Everybody is talking to a machine now, and the noise is hard to sit inside.
Every second post is a prompt, a thread, a course, a promise. A lot of people who had never mentioned artificial intelligence a year ago are talking about little else now. There is a gold-rush feeling to it that I remember from the crypto years, and I remember it because I was standing in the middle of that one.
So let me say what I took from that time, in case it saves someone the trip. In a gold rush, almost nobody finds gold. The people who tend to come out fine are the ones selling shovels, and the ones who quietly keep doing the actual work while everyone else is in the meeting about the gold.
I use these tools every day. I want to be honest about that, because there is a kind of purity going around, a refusal to touch any of it, and I don't think that helps anyone. The tools are remarkable, and I would be working with one hand tied behind my back without them.
But I use them in one direction, and the direction is the whole of it. They speed up what I have already decided. They do not decide it for me. The moment I catch myself asking the machine what I should think, instead of telling it what I have concluded, I stop, because that is the moment a craftsman turns into an operator, and I don't want to make that trade.
The hype will burn off. It always does. What will be left, I think, is a small number of people who used the loud years to get genuinely faster at the parts that never mattered much, so they could spend more of their life on the parts that always did.
That is the plan. It isn't a very exciting one. But it is the one I trust.