Taming the dragon
Over the last few months, I’ve been experimenting with using AI for web development: Visual Math Lab, this website, my Monte Carlo Methods notes. I’ve created many more apps for personal use, reorganized my computer, streamlined my work, and so on and so forth. I didn’t write a single line of code; I just kept prompting Claude until I was happy with the result. It felt like managing a team of highly skilled programmers, far better than I’ll ever be. It has saved me an insane amount of time and effort.
And yet, most of the time, when I’m done, I feel nothing but anxious. It’s like coming down from a high. It’s like an addiction.
I’ve started noticing that doing anything with AI takes much longer than I expect. I’ll open up a website thinking I just need to fix one thing, and two hours later here I am, tweaking the CSS, adjusting margins, researching fonts…
Don’t get me wrong - I’m in awe of its power. I’ve built an app to track my finances in a day, something I could never have done before: not in a day, not ever. It feels like living in a science fiction novel. But this technology is too powerful for me. It’s a dragon, and I need to learn to tame it.
In a way, AI feels like social media 2.0. It took me years to figure out how to use social media without it using me. I still waste a decent amount of time online, but I’ve contained the damage to a few websites, and even there I’ve curated my feeds so I see the good stuff and none of the toxicity. I need to do the same for AI.
Taming the dragon takes mindfulness, and a lot of patience and compassion toward myself. I keep trying, I keep failing. There have been lost days, and sore eyes from staring at the screen.
But now I feel like I’ve found an equilibrium. A harness, as they say in the AI world. Fitting, for a dragon. Every time I sit down at my computer, I write a line in my journal about what I intend to do, and I try to do just that. This simple act of setting an intention and writing it down somehow keeps me mindful and works like blinders, keeping distractions out.
The dragon is not tamed. But it’s on a leash.