Pick your favorite outage monitor:
Because basically that is all people could do today. OpenAI, Claude, and Grok all went down at the same time. Shout out to Gemini for keeping the lights on for vibe coders.
However, here’s what happened in real life. People went to social media to complain. Everyone asked what AI tool is still working. How can they finish their job today?
Here’s what I did: Check the status of the one’s I use. Realize they were down, reviewed my tasks for today, and get this: I started coding. Well, I actually started debugging to see what the issue actually was that I was working on, but I opened VS Code, kicked off a docker container, synced some data, updated environment variables to test on different environments, reproed the issue, and then… I fixed it. Not me and Claude, not Codex, not AI. ME.
How is that even possible in today’s AI crazy world?
Because I know how to code. More importantly I know how to debug. I also know how to trace code. I know pitfalls that happen usually when something happens that is “unexpected”. How can I know all of that without an AI telling me what is wrong? Because I’ve been doing it since I was 9 years old.
I LOVE coding. Coding with AI is a lot faster, but I still like to know what the hell that AI is doing in some cases. Don’t get me wrong, in other cases, I don’t care, did it solve the problem, fix the text change, change the color, update the CSS, great. Did it make a security architecture decision that would violate SLAs, compliance laws, and performance, ok, then I care… I care a lot.
I’ve been invited to so many meetups, conferences, and groups to talk about how to implement AI. It is the tech version of talking about Taylor Swift’s wedding. Everyone is talking about it, but no one talking about it actually attended it. And in this case, they didn’t implement it ever.
They all have hypothesis on what works. How to protect your data. How to make your engineering team more efficient. They are all selling you courses, consultancy contracts, and none of them have actually done it. I have. I have built AI personas, AI agents, taught numerous people about setting up AI locally, how to handle easy tasks, and complex tasks. I’ve done full youtube videos of how I created a persona from scratch to a new YouTuber.
Those people selling you that garbage, the Don Lapre of AI, (if you know who he is, you were a child of 90s). Ask them this: “What did you try that didn’t work, and where would you specifically recommend not using AI in an engineering organization?”
Most people will who haven’t done it, will respond: Our framework actually handles those cases, and even allows the flexibility to adhere to your custom business rules. That is fluff and them redirecting the question. They haven’t done it, they want you to pay for something from someone who doesn’t have the pain of actually doing it.
The thing I’m learning more and more is that content is simply that content. It may not be useful, practical, or even entertaining. But there is a lot of it.
Ok, I’m going to go on tangent right now, because this is not my regular weekly newsletter, that will be coming out this weekend, but for those subscribing, this is a random post about things…
I’ve been following the Lindsay Clancy case for 6 weeks now, and the jury is on day 6 I think of deliberating that is over 30 hours of discussing the case. If you don’t know, quick summary: She allegedly strangled her three children due to Post-Partum Psychosis. That is the defense. Anyway, I won’t get into the details of the case, because that’s not what I want to get into. I want to talk about content. The jury is deliberating for 6 days. That is 6 days of news channels speculating about what they are doing, what are the outcomes, how can they view it this way or that way, what if… Anyway, my point is, it is filler. They should say, we are going to go off the air until the jury comes back with a ruling, put up a Jury Watch clock, and go home until the jury comes back. It is not real content. It is like all the annoying teaser, click bait insanity: 10 ways to lose 10 pounds by October. The best 8 places to live in NY. The secret underbelly of Big Tech and how you can protect yourself. IT’S ALL GARBAGE to get your attention. And the algorithms are GOOD, I mean REAL good. So good, they are getting sued for destroying teenagers.
Anyway, I’ve learned so much about the YouTube algorithm recently because I have created 3 channels of people and their content is getting over 1k views on almost every post. It’s crazy. They aren’t even real people, but newer content gets raised up, and now you have to keep on the wheel to deliver content to keep those numbers up. You can look at my Startups and Code channel and I have about 16 views. Why? Because the content is 2 years old and I haven’t posted regularly.
Anyway, my point in this post is simple:
AI is a tool, use it carefully. Know how to operate without it if needed. Generate content all you want, but know why you are doing it. For fun, for entertainment, for education, who cares, but have a real intent behind it.
Also, never get so engrossed in it that you forget how to say hello, hold the door for someone, and smile at a stranger to make them have a little brighter day.
That’s all. I’m going to generate some YouTube short now for Eliza and Nova. Rhett is doing fine right now. LOL Let’s see if this post tracks as 100% human generated, because the lack of consistency, randomness, and crazy rants, no way an AI could do it. No picture this time other than the outage too. So let’s see what it says.
See you this weekend on the regularly scheduled newsletter. Thanks for your support and encouragement to keep me doing this. I truly do appreciate it.