Old MacDonald outsourced his farm, AI, AI. Oh.

No, I don't want AI added to every product, service and website. No, I do not want to have to shell out for 20 different subscriptions because your product has a specific esoteric LLM that I have to pay separately for just because it can integrate with your software better.

AI is a tool, it is not a solution. It doesn't fix the problems in your application, it just burns the world while it uses its baked-in polyfills to get around your bad UI. Too many apps push you to use their AI to help you find information and to "get in touch" - how about you have better navigation, sign-posting and UX so people can find it themselves without relying on some half-baked chatbot claiming to have natural language processing?

I was speaking with an accessibility consultant a while ago and he was bemoaning those widgets people can add to their website to "improve" accessibility. He was saying that, if he needed bigger text or different contrast, he would have his own tool to do it. You wouldn't expect someone who turns up to a shop in their own wheelchair to be forced to swap it for the shop-provided one. I feel the same about AI; I have an LLM I am paying for, don't force me to use yours - allow me to continue to use my personalised assistant within your property.

While I rant on about AI, you'd think I was some sort of hater - but I'm an avid user. It has its place, it is a useful tool but this scattergun multi-LLM approach the tech industry seems to be taking at the moment needs to stop. Allow us to bring our own LLM if we have one, expose your service or app as an MCP or plugin, so I can use my customised AI agent of choice to do the things you desperately need me to use an AI for.

I see AI as a force-multiplier, not a replacement. Companies laying off staff because they "have AI" are missing the point (even Ford realised their mistake). AI increases the potential of anyone using it effectively, and raises the ceiling on how much complexity they can handle. It can churn away at the bug, it can chip away at the low "grunt level" tasks and allow the human to think [I really wanted to write "transcend" here]. I've found I've got a new capacity for thinking and problem solving and tackling bigger problems because AI is assessing and proposing a fix for that bug at the same time.

AI can be good on its own, but it can be great with a human.

Use it as a rubber-duck. Use it to solve that issue, tick off that lingering to-do or optimise that gnarly bash script. Use it to build internal tools for reporting and scratching that itch. Use it to aid you in solving production-ready code. Review the plans, hone the plans, craft the plans but then walk away while it does the grunt work.

Take it bowling, but keep the barriers up. That's how you get good results with it.

It's great for helping you solve that niche problem that you wouldn't find on a Reddit thread or to make sure you're not asking a ridiculous question. It's wonderful for helping my 7-year-old budding botanist identify plants and flowers.

I've tried a few of the popular LLMs and have settled on Claude as my favoured one. It seems a lot more code-focused (which is what I mainly use it for) although I will pop over to Gemini if I need/want to do any image/video/music creating or editing (this is normally for humorous effect rather than anything serious).

Now I've got that off my chest I can go away and have fun.

Note: This post was about getting my current thoughts on AI down as a snapshot. My views may, and will, change.