Is there a 'right amount' of AI?

While I’ve made my skepticism of AI clear by now, I’m not an anti-AI purist fighting against “no apps with any hint of AI coding allowed on my machine.” For one thing, it’s almost certainly a lost battle. Microsoft and Apple are both using coding agents for OS development, and while I can’t prove that most people running Linux have at least some LLM-touched code somewhere on their system, I’d be incredibly surprised if it’s not there. Just this week, I moved back to Overcast from Castro as my podcast player. (I’ve spent a decade or so switching between them. Castro’s queue system is terrific, but the app has always been buggier than Overcast, its subscription price skyrocketed a year or so ago, and it’s now on its third owner—a shady-looking company that’s already diluted the privacy policy.) I know that developer Marco Arment has become an enthusiastic “agentic coder”, and that this means Overcast has Claude-generated code in it. Ditto his fun new app Fineliner, which I’m using on my…

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