‘Don’t use AI for X’ – On AI addiction and slippery slopes

‘We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.’ John M. Culkin There has been an interesting discussion (of sorts) going on around the use of AI on the IndieWeb. What I know of it started with Brennan Brown’s article ‘The IndieWeb Now Has genAI and Claude Built-in (sic)’ (which has since been re-titled). I was in the process of wrapping up my follow-up essay to my re-definition of the ‘IndieWeb’ when Brennan’s article showed up on my feed reader, prompting me to pause working on my essay. I think Brennan makes an interesting point in his piece, but it was really the news he writes about that took me by surprise. To put it briefly, Aaron Parecki, an incredibly important figure in the IndieWeb space thanks to his role as the originator and maintainer of several core IndieWeb projects, has recently been using Claude to write his code. This includes code for webmention.io, a service I use regularly, including as part of my Statamic add-on on this website, to display and keep up…