Recent GitHub Activity

My Github activity since around November 2025 shows a fairly remarkable change. Anyone who writes software can make a reasonable guess about what happened: I began adopting generative AI for various creative endeavors, largely related to writing software. Edit: This is not the only reason the contributions went up significantly, but it is a major reason.

I was very bearish about GenAI when it first came out. I still have a lot of reservations about the hype around it, as well as with the negative impact that it will have on humanity as a whole, and yet I use it every day now to accomplish things that I would have not had the willingness to try to tackle before. I know I am not alone: a lot of engineers are not on one side or the other of the AI argument, but squarely in the middle (I know this because I’ve spoken to them and have read the writings of many others).

One thing I continue to insist that we accept is that GenAI is not intelligent. It is good at generating statistically likely chains of words, but it does not think. This doesn’t mean it is useless, on the contrary I’ve seen many people with various levels of computer skills and engineering understanding, from very little to the very experienced and knowledgeable, accomplish valuable work with the help of GenAI. However, if you insist on claiming there is intelligence where there is not, then you either are drinking the kool-aid or selling it.

Enough people are talking about AI though, and honestly I would just be adding another opinion that really doesn’t help much in the thinking around how we should be using these things, who should own and operate these things, etc. so I’ll stop here. What I will consider posting from time-to-time is how I actually use tools like Claude Code (and Claude in general) so others can make their own decisions about whether or not they want to use the tools.

Also, one final note: I do not require anyone on my team at DNSimple to use GenAI, however we do have policies about how it may and may not be used that must be followed. We also are trying to regularly evolve our thinking, collaborating and learning what works for us and what doesn’t, and engaging the entire team in discussing both the practical merits as well as the social issues around GenAI usage.