Why I created my blog
We live in a completely new era in technology and software. Artificial intelligence is being studied for many years now, many years before I was even born1.
When I was defending my thesis back in 2020, I never thought that LLMs would be such a big thing in future. When I started my career in software, again I couldn't even imagine that in a short amount of time, we would be using AI code assistance.
Now, AI is fully integrated in our lifes with GPT, Claude, Gemini etc., and people use it for every meaningful or trivial task in their life. Consultation on various topics, automating repeatitive and tedious tasks, and of course software.
Initially, I was very skeptical of it. As a person who was aware of pattern recognition, bayesian statistics, in general how Deep Learning evolved, and since I had studied a lot on the matter 5 years ago, I was telling a couple of my friends: "How are you so sure that this percentage of jobs will be automated?", or "You've not seen a very large codebase yet, that's why you think AI can do all the work on it's own.". I still believe I am right after all. Yet again I've changed my mindset regarding a couple of things.
I was refusing also to use AI in coding, since some of the magic feel of finding solutions on your own, searching forums etc., was a real skill. You could prove in the past that you are adaptive and competent in a different way, in contrast with the current era.
I was also very skeptical of the fact that AI is about pattern recognition after all. There is no determinism. You will get an answer but it's always based on known patterns, and trained data. And when you are building software, you need precision. But if you iterate a couple of times towards a solution(what AI tools do today), isn't this approximating or even solving the problem? And after all, as engineers, if we cannot solve problems, we have at least to approximate them.
Another reason I wasn't using AI, is that since the 9th month of my career and onwards, I switched to Neovim, and never really looked back. The advantages were a ton. Apart from the fact that it's more fun and you build muscle memory, indeed if you master this tool, you can easily become much faster, until...AI took over.
Cursor, VS Code with AI plugins and many others, made vibe coding a thing.
I said to myself, there must be something in Neovim too. And that's how I found avante.nvim. I've been using Avante extensively for almost a year now, and it really boosted my performance.
Lately I am using opencode too, and I found it really game changing, especially while using it on my tmux setup(more in a future blog post).
Well, I understood recently, that presence online is needed. Skills become obsolete quickly, and you have to showcase to the world what you know, and that you are capable to be adaptive in every possible scenario.
That's why I started this blog.
Footnotes
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F. Rosenblatt, "The perceptron: a probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain," Psychological Review, vol. 65, no. 6, pp. 386-408, 1958. ↩