When it comes to "engines that fabricate articles in a fraudulent and deceitful manner", I agree with the luddites. I am concerned that generative tools powered by large language models (LLMs) -- such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini -- often nudge people toward fabricating products in a fraudulent and deceitful manner.
So, when I published a new website that was substantially shaped by Claude Code, I felt the need to share some of my reasoning.
To get a little meta, let me start by saying that drafting (and/or editing) my writing is one of the tasks for which I refuse to use LLMs. I believe writing is thinking -- that is, (I think) one of the best ways to understand what is happening in my brain is to translate my thoughts into language (and/or visualizations). Within this framework, every word outsourced to a generative model is a missed opportunity to strengthen my own thinking.
The analogy of "bringing a forklift to the weight room" has been an effective way to communicate this principle to students. If you don't want to strengthen your thinking, then by all means, go ahead and have LLMs do your writing. And I have to ask, if you don't want to strengthen your thinking, what made you decide to enroll in school?
There does seem to be a difference between outsourcing a thought process and outsourcing a building process. In the case of my website, for example, I have gone back and forth between managing it on my own versus outsourcing it (Ghost, Wordpress, etc.). Writing html is time-consuming. But when I let Ghost handle all the html, I lose some control. It also costs more money, and creates a dependency on their hosting services.
I wanted the best of multiple worlds:
It's only a little personal website, but ultimately, all technologies are political. So I sketched out my idea for a new website and fired up Claude code. I checked all the outputted html, performed some tests, and kept track of my prompts. For the most part, it felt like working one layer of abstraction above existing high-level programming languages -- for example, I still used html vocabulary (e.g. div, span) to guide the output.
Why all the fuss? Who cares if a website is vibe-coded? Well I do, and if you are reading this, you probably do as well. We are the working-class nerds! We know it's not just about code and control, it's about freedom! And as Eliza Ludd wrote, "curs’d his the man that even lifts a straw against the sacred cause of Liberty." Dare I say, we are the Neo-luddites?
As you may have heard, Claude code is pretty capable. It made the website renovations pretty quick, and eliminated a lot of time that I would have spent searching online for different html and css snippets. Since it is my website, I do feel responsible for the code that is published -- understanding it well enough to maintain it and adjust it without an LLM.
My main hesitation at this point is that Anthropic kind of sucks. They're running on billions of dollars from Amazon and ruthlessly stealing intellectual property wherever they can. This is not to mention their violent partnerships with Palantir and the U.S. military. And don't forget about all the unnecessary resource-hungry data centers!
So, as of writing, I am exploring ollama launch in order to hopefully "get off" Anthropic as well. The struggle continues.
Thanks for reading, fellow nerd!