2026-07-30
I find AI chatbots to be helpful, but I limit myself to how I use them.
I tried “vibe coding” once in the past for a mobile app (never
shared it online as it wasn’t very impressive and I wouldn’t like
to share pure AI content), I was actually quite impressed with
how well it did, but the overall experience just wasn’t
enjoyable. It’s essentially just feeding error messages to the
AI, getting a solution, then moving onto the next error message.
You don’t get a real understanding of how the code works, which
for me is half the fun of coding something.
It’s something I might use in the future if I just need a
specific program that would otherwise take ages (say I need to
interface with some file format I have no experience with, and
it’s a one off thing), but I don’t think I’ll ever “vibe code” a
whole project, and I don’t like the idea of posting AI code on my
GitHub etc, feels a bit lazy.
The area where AI chatbots are most useful to me is tech
support stuff. I do have a rule that I need to read the manual,
and google the problem first, but if that fails I will often ask
a chatbot for help, and they are generally pretty good. A recent
example was some configuration issues I had with
gophernicus. Googled for a solution but eventually
asked AI, and it helped me realise I was using my VPS hostname
instead of the domain name as an argument, causing the issue.
A lot of potential chatbot usages have simpler alternatives. For example when learning a new programming language, you could ask AI to summarise all the core features, or you could just look at learnxinyminutes.com. It’s tempting to ask AI anytime you have a problem with a command, but building the habit of reading manual pages is better, and often leads to a more correct solution anyway.
Chatbots are also useful for non-computer questions, it sits at a good middleground between a google search, and making a reddit thread. There are a lot of questions you have that google doesn’t fully answer, but people would flame you for making a reddit thread about because it’s too vague or general of a question. Recent example: which cheap VPS provider is best - AI is good for this because it will search the internet and aggregate a bunch of responses.
Other than chatbots, I find AI stuff to be quite annoying. AI images, videos and songs were funny/novel when they first came about, but now there is so much of it that it’s not really funny or entertaining anymore, and you start to associate that style with low-effort content, because 99% of it is. Occasionally you find something funny.
I also don’t like AI being integrated into other programs/websites/systems, this is a problem I have generally. Everything tries to become the ultimate service, instead of just focusing on one thing. I don’t need an AI answer to my google search, if I need an AI answer I can just ask Gemini. I don’t like AI bots being included on shopping sites. Just let me search through Amazon reviews for specific words, I don’t need a general summary or aggregated product info.
The two main chatbots I’ve used are ChatGPT and Claude, I find Claude to be significantly better than ChatGPT, especially for computer/Linux related questions. ChatGPT seems to get stuck on one idea, whereas Claude will go “oh that didn’t work, let me re-consider if it was a good approach”. I don’t pay for either of them as I find the free limits on usage are plenty and it’s very rare I hit them.
I’ve also played around with local AI models. Some of them are pretty good, Gemma 4 was quite impressive, but they aren’t as good as the online ones.
Also shoutout to duck.ai which is nice because you don’t have to login.
So far I haven’t posted any content online that was made with AI, including on my GitHub and website. I don’t think I’ll ever post a vibe coded program, or an AI written blog post/article, as it defeats the point of sharing stuff. If someone else could just generate the content themselves, why bother posting it? It’s like when people reply to reddit threads with an AI answer, couldn’t the OP just have done that themselves?
AI might have been used to assist in configs/code I post (never for writing), for example I couldn’t get my main website CSS to work so I asked ChatGPT and it helped me get the sidebar set up properly, but this was a case of changing 1 or 2 lines, not a full AI generated stylesheet.