I love coding. I love writing. I love writing about coding, as evidenced by the archives of this blog and the multiple tech books I have written.
I’ve always prided myself on being able to explain things clearly. I have a unique ability to identify the order in which to teach concepts. I have enough five star reviews on my books to know that there are plenty of readers out there who agree with me.
As a member, separately, of the programming and writing communities, I’ve seen plenty of excitement, agitation, skepticism, and consternation about the rapidly evolving AI revolution. For the most part, I’ve been on the excited side of the spectrum, though I also carry plenty of skepticism.
It’s not clear whether AI will take our programming jobs or completely replace the author in writing e.g. fiction.
But there is one successful usage of AI that is already proven: It is the go-to tool for obtaining information about technical topics. Stack Overflow usage is in absolute free-fall.
Last year I published the book LazyVim for Ambitious Developers. I made it freely available on the web and many people have been kind enough to support me by donation or purchasing the ebook and hard cover editions. Of the thousands of page hits the site receives every month, only a fraction result in a sale, but that fraction is meaningful to me.
Because the book is freely available, I feared it will be used in training the next generation of AI models, without my consent. So far, this hasn’t been the case as far as my queries to AI can tell, but they can already use a search engine to find my work and ingest it in a single conversation.
I don’t want to put the book behind a paywall or even a captcha wall. I want people to know about it, and the only way they’ll know about it is if bots such as search engines and AI scrapers actually recommend it to them.
Theft of intellectual property is a hotly debated topic in the AI discussions, but it’s not the point of this article.
I am planning to write a book on the Gleam programming language. I’m very comfortable with the language, but I need to understand Erlang and OTP a lot better before I can include chapters on it, so I’ve been building some sample applications using those libraries. I used AI extensively to help me understand these libraries and ecosystems.
Of course I did.
AI can already explain Gleam to me very clearly. It doesn’t explain it exactly the way I would and it hallucinates and false starts constantly. But it is certainly good enough to get the point across. And it has the advantage of explaining things to a reader the way that reader wants to understand it. People who think my writing is too familiar or too verbose (the most common complaints in the relatively few negative reviews I’ve received) may be able to get the AI to explain it in a way that works better for them.
But people who DO like my style can literally say “tell me how to use Gleam in the style of Dusty Phillips” and share links to articles this blog or some of the chapters of the LazyVim book. I tried it. It is super uncanny valley. It’s not exactly me, but I won’t say it’s not not me either.
I can do better than the AI, at least at the moment. But I can’t really justify putting in the time to do better. I spent hundreds of hours writing the LazyVim book and I’ve made all of $5000 off it. My first book, Python Object Oriented Programming has netted me six figures, and still isn’t worth the months of full-time effort I put into three editions of it (which is why I handed it off for the fourth and subsequent editions).
THIS is the identity crisis: I’ve had a talent for explaining things from a young age, and I’ve honed the talent into a skill over several decades. I derived satisfaction from knowing that I do it better than average. Now that skill has already been commodified.
So what am I good for anymore? Writing code? Vibe coding hasn’t successfully commodified software development, yet, but there is a reasonable chance it will. Writing fiction? Also not clear whether AI will take that over. Give up and focus on woodworking? Not gonna pay the bills I’ve accrued over decades of cushy software engineering salaries.
I have hopes for a utopian future where AI does everything better than humans, which allows us to spend our time poorly doing the things we are most excited about. I know that robotic assembly lines can build furniture more efficiently and to a higher quality level than I can on my own, but I still enjoy woodworking. I know there are plenty of writers out there who have no intention of actually publishing their work.
So I can still write for fun, even if we end up in a world where AI is definitively better at it than I am. I have no idea if I actually would. I don’t know exactly what my motivation would look like in that world.
I don’t even know if I’m going to write this next book.