A couple quotes that I heard recently have been floating around in my head.
“I think if you don’t have dreams about what might happen in your life, then how do you know what you want to do next? How do you choose whether I should do this or do that if you don’t really care where you end up? … I think it’s a wonderful gift to reflect within yourself and ask what do I actually hope will happen in my life if my life goes perfectly from now on? What do I dream will happen and what am I doing today and this weekend in order to change who I am deliberately?”
– Astronaut Chris Hadfield on the Mythfits podcast, April 27, 2026
I like this one because it encourages us to have a vision and work towards it. If you just float along letting life happen to you, it’s unlikely that your situation is going to improve.
The next one comes from the creator of a popular open-source project that recently decided not to allow AI generated code submissions. While this is about code, I think it applies to AI generated text even more.
It’s a common misconception that we can’t tell who is using LLM and who is not. I’m sure we didn’t catch 100% of LLM-assisted PRs over the past few months, but the kind of mistakes humans make are fundamentally different than LLM hallucinations, making them easy to spot. Furthermore, people who come from the world of agentic coding have a certain digital smell that is not obvious to them but is obvious to those who abstain. It’s like when a smoker walks into the room, everybody who doesn’t smoke instantly knows it.
I’m not telling you not to smoke, but I am telling you not to smoke in my house.
— Andrew Kelley
You can read more about their rationale for this move here. I’m not sure I totally agree with it because I think source code is becoming a generated artifact and specs are more important, I do think about this comparison to smoking every time I’m writing text and using AI to help me clean it up.
Quotes
A couple quotes that I heard recently have been floating around in my head.
I like this one because it encourages us to have a vision and work towards it. If you just float along letting life happen to you, it’s unlikely that your situation is going to improve.
The next one comes from the creator of a popular open-source project that recently decided not to allow AI generated code submissions. While this is about code, I think it applies to AI generated text even more.
You can read more about their rationale for this move here. I’m not sure I totally agree with it because I think source code is becoming a generated artifact and specs are more important, I do think about this comparison to smoking every time I’m writing text and using AI to help me clean it up.