I’ve been deliberately avoiding AI. To be frank, I don’t trust it. I’ve seen too many instances of careers getting ruined, or worst, from trusting AI too much. I guess you could call me old-school, because, well, I am.

But AI is here to stay, and not taking advantage of it can also be a career-killer.

At work, I’ve been working on a project, and part of this project is to learn how to leverage GitHub copilot. I’m writing a node.js application with a couple of other folks, and I’ve been using copilot to help (as we have an enterprise subscription).

And, as it turns out, it’s saving literally hours or days of time.

It’s anything but perfect. You have to be very detailed in what you ask it for, and what it provides is never perfect. If you don’t check very carefully what it returns and make sure that it’s sane, it will provide stuff that, best case, doesn’t work but gets you most of the way there, and worst case, appears to work and doesn’t get you there at all. Most of the time taken is going back through after AI does its thing and cleaning up after it. But that’s still a net saving of time, and by a large margin.

My take on AI is that it’s basically a natural language word processor. It takes a prompt that you put in, expands on it, and creates code that is syntactically correct and only sometimes works. But because creating syntactically correct code is the most time consuming drudgery of coding, it’s a massive timesaver, and I’m planning on buying a personal subscription. for $10/mo, it’s worth it.

Unfortunately.

GitHub is one of those companies that I’ve been deliberately avoiding. It’s not because it’s not useful, and not because it’s not a good product. It’s because they’re one of those companies that’s unfortunately ideologically coopted, and they have these really onerous “code of conduct” thingies that can also extend its tendrils to your “offline” life (do something they don’t approve of, even if not on the platform, and they’ll drop you). I believe, personally, that in interacting with any community, one should treat it professionally, and avoid talking about things that don’t belong in corporate culture.

To companies like GitHub, everything belongs in corporate culture. As long as it’s not “right wing” (which is anything to the right of Stalin).

But it’s too useful. It saves too much time. It puts things within reach that weren’t within reach for me previously.

So I guess I have to choke back the bile and give them money.

I’m hoping that Trump’s “war against DEI” is going to help to curb the worst of this. Things don’t seem as bad as they were a couple of years ago. Maybe if I keep my head down, do my projects, and don’t interact with any other project in any way, maybe it will be okay. I hope.

And the very fact that this needs to be a consideration is the problem.

I remember a few years ago, I was using wordpress.com, and they put a pride banner up the header of that site. I come to these sites to do a task – not to get assaulted by the political (and yes, it is political) message of the day. I’m not interested in pride or transgender or even Christianity when I come to a “professional” site to do a “professional” task. In fact, I was so annoyed, I wrote a tampermonkey script to get rid of that pride banner. I haven’t needed to do that as much lately (except for those dolts that have to virtue signal about “standing with Ukraine) but it’s still annoying. I just want to get my task done.

(If you stand with Ukraine, go fight. Otherwise shut up. Putting up flags and saying how great they are (“slava Ukraini”) does nothing.)

Unfortunately, GitHub’s tools are just too useful for that purpose.

The world has changed a lot since I first got into open source (before it was called that) software. It was egalitarian, for the most part. If you were good at what you did, people would work with you. Those days seem long gone. Now it doesn’t matter if you’re good, it just matters if you say (not even think) the right thing. And everyone suffers. I wasn’t the greatest person back then. I own that. But at the time, there was a place for me there. It hasn’t felt that way for over a decade now.

So much the worse, I guess. Now I’m into other things. I just wish I could get back the feeling of accomplishment I used to get when i wrote something particularly useful. Maybe AI will help with that. A little.

Even if I have to sell my soul for it.