Ninety percent of what I search for now lands me on an article that was clearly generated, never read by a human, and written from nothing. No experience, no expertise, no conviction. Just output shaped to catch a click. It is the trash of the internet, and content farms built it on purpose.

So when I tell you AI touches every note on this blog, I want to be clear about what that means, because it is the opposite of that.

Same goes for vibe coding. The name is fun and cute, but real engineers do not vibe anything. I use AI for 100% of my development now. None of it gets designed, committed, or released on a vibe. Leaning on AI is what makes someone a 100x developer. Strong harnesses and human-in-the-loop are what make me a 90x developer and not a 100x one, and I am ok with that. The maintainability, the security, and the reliability are where that other 10x was going to leak out anyway, and that is the part that pays off over the life of a system.

§The actual workflow, because the workflow is the argument

I have always been bad at notes. There is a paper pad next to my desk and I fill three or four pages a day with chicken scratch. The name of a library I want to check later, a concept I am confused about, a two line todo. Paper is for anything I do not need to remember past tomorrow. Then there is Obsidian, open all day, markdown, which I have been writing since around 2008. That is the stuff I might want a year from now. It is my long-term memory and it is exactly as disorganized as the paper.

Around 2018 I started turning those notes into long-form articles, for three reasons: to actually commit what I had learned to memory, to force myself to verify I had learned it right, and to get better at writing. Two out of three is not bad. I never got faster. I treat writing like code and obsess line over line, and it kills my productivity. I muscled through a 500 page book for Apress and I am happy with it, but it took a year, and most of it was code. In this industry, writing that slow means it is legacy before it hits the press.

AI fixed the part I could not fix on my own. At the end of a day I can hand it a pile of notes, a pass over the source I wrote, and five or six paragraphs of stream-of-consciousness brain dump, all markdown, all mine. It sorts it out and structures it and hands it back in a shape that is more useful to me first and hopefully to you second. The narrow ones, tied to a client or a single system, stay in my knowledge base. The ones that generalize land here, and I send my team a link.

The part I did not expect is how often it catches me. I will write down something I am sure I understand, and the draft that comes back exposes a gap or a wrong assumption I did not know I had. So it challenges me and I challenge it back, and that back-and-forth is where most of the verifying actually happens. The loop in the diagram runs on disagreement, not agreement.

§Why this exists at all

This site was never a destination. I have run Amazon affiliate links for a decade and still have not cleared the minimum to get paid out on a ten dollar credit. Ninety percent of what I do for a living belongs to the clients I do it for and cannot be posted publicly. So writing here is an exercise. Putting your notes in public is one of the best ways to pressure-test whether you actually understand something. AI made that easier. It is also prone to confabulation, which is exactly why I read every line and I am the one who has to stand behind it.

Could some AI slop slip onto this blog? Sure. But it is far more likely to be Craig-slop. I will just let the AI take the blame. The conviction behind it is mine, though, and conviction is the one thing you cannot generate from nothing.