AI

How I actually use it

Most days I'm pairing with an AI the way I'd pair with a sharp, tireless colleague. I sketch the approach out loud and hand off a lot of the building. Rather than reading every line back, I dogfood the result, putting myself in the end-user's shoes and using the thing the way someone actually would. That's usually where the real problems surface, the ones no diff would have shown me anyway. The product judgment stays mine, and I've happily stopped Googling how to center a div.

On real product work I lean on AI to keep the quality bar high. I have Claude Code write the unit and end-to-end tests, and I make sure the Playwright suites cover every core workflow, not just the happy path. Then I put the work through repeated audits, code review, security review, and design review, using both Claude Code and a second model like ChatGPT. I keep iterating until both of them come back with no critical or blocking issues. Two careful reviewers with different blind spots catch far more than I would on my own.

Where it helps, and where it doesn't

• Genuinely great for

  First drafts, unfamiliar APIs, tedious refactors, and being the rubber duck that actually answers back. It gets me to a working sketch faster than I would alone.

• Still on me

  Architecture, trade-offs, taste, and knowing when the confident answer is quietly wrong. The AI proposes. I'm the one accountable for what ships.

• The honest bit

  It hallucinates, it over-explains, and it'll happily write code I shouldn't merge. Treating its output as a draft, never a verdict, is most of the skill.

The tools I reach for

Mostly Claude Code for the day-to-day building, plus a second model like ChatGPT as an independent set of eyes when the stakes are high. This very site (the 3D experience, the visitors wandering it, these pages) was built that way: me steering, an AI doing a lot of the typing.

On "AI slop"

Let me set the modesty aside for one section. There is a word getting thrown around right now, slop, aimed at anything built with AI, usually sight unseen. I get the reflex. The web is filling up with low-effort, machine-stamped filler, and it earns the eye-roll. But the word has turned into a lazy way to dismiss AI-assisted work wholesale, often before anyone has actually looked at it. So before you decide, look.

The 3D experience on this site was built with AI in the loop, every last piece of it, and after two decades of building things by hand I can tell you it is the furthest thing from slop. Walk through the front door of a gallery you can actually roam. Flip the switch by the door and dim the whole room with a real brightness control. Watch a comet drift across a sky that runs its own day and night cycle, then track down the hidden telescope and see it up close. Chat with the people wandering the space, who turn into gentle night characters once it gets dark. Hunt the easter eggs tucked behind the buildings, a debugging duck, a little rocket on the launchpad, an arcade cabinet still glowing in the corner. Read the hand-drawn engineering sketches on the rolling whiteboard. Tap the benches, the lampposts, even the potted plants, and watch every one of them answer back. And none of the art is a stock image. It is all drawn in code.

That is not slop. That is craft, reached higher and built faster because of the tools I now work with, things I could not have made alone. If you still want to call it slop, that is your right. Just be ready to show me something better.