I’ve been attempting to use generative AI to help me write documentation because there’s so much pressure to be able to say you’re using it right now, and I honestly think the outputs are unusable without essentially rewriting the whole thing.

I find the outputs are:

• Excessively verbose (please get to the point)
• Subtly incorrect, and I’d rather just research and write correct information than spend time fact checking AI
• Not quite what I want, because the machine can’t read my mind, and I feel like prompting it correctly and then fact checking and editing the output would be more time consuming than just writing the damn thing
• Just like, tonally weird

I don’t know, it’s a weird experience. I will give it this:

This article exists because at least three people have asked me this question already and I want some place to which I can point them. Maybe I’ll eventually write a less tongue-in-cheek post about how and why I blog, but for now, you get this.

I started writing this blog exactly a year ago. The research project I was working on at the time was driving me insane, I’d started writing an article about corporate dress codes out of sheer frustration, and I felt like it was a good time to stop merely thinking about starting a blog and actually sit down and do it.

I think you can learn a lot about a person by examining what they read.

I don’t know if you’ve ever opened a book someone recommended to you and been like, “oh, of course this person would like this,” but it can explain a lot.

I think I can break down most white collar jobs into the following categories:

1. People who produce relationships (for example, sales or recruiting)
2. People who produce things (usually products)
3. People who produce infrastructure (usually involving technology)
4. People who produce processes
5. People who produce information
6. People who produce decisions

These 6 categories are what I suspect “value” in business terms can be broken down into, and of course, we spend a lot of time trying to quantify that value using dollar amounts. How much you get paid is a function of how much value you’re perceived to produce. For example, it seems like society has decided that producing decisions is a high value activity.