My AI policy [blog]

There's no shortage of commentary on LLM usage and I've penned several posts that have never left draft status because in part I can't articulate exactly what I want, and partly because there's so much noise around the subject.

That's been true for the last few years but as an senior (and old) developer I think it might be useful to at least put in writing what happens to be true for me this moment in October 2026.

Fair notice: this post will only briefly cover any policy I personally hold and quickly move into my opinions about LLMs and our community.

On this blog

Yeah, no. My words are mine. They might be regurgitated in your LLM chat session, but every typo, grammar failure and angry word is mine here.

Additionally, the code that drives this site is almost all mine. I do use a few node libraries here and there (probably pug is the biggest one), but the "author code" is all me too.

To be clear, this isn't because I'm some kind of shining light in the dark, it's because I need to protect some space for me to continue to practice development.

I personally understand why an LLM would be used for code, but I can't fathom why someone might use it for their words. But that's for me, not for you to worry about.

I can see legitimate LLM use for ideation, legibility checking and translation - but that's not for me and not for this blog.

Elsewhere

I'm not entirely anti-AI. My position has changed over time, probably linked to progress in progress in generative/better auto complete in code.

But I'm not pro-AI either. I've not one sung it's praises to anyone. I might tell you about a thing I've used an LLM to make, and I do appreciate even writing about the experience might be read as pro-AI, but you won't find me telling you that you should use it.

I'm using an LLM to complement my client work. My work is a mix of understanding a full system, directing the agent (which might be slightly different if I didn't work in a silo) and critically reviewing code changes.

I've always considered my job (for over 2 decades) to be a communication task. To communicate business needs to functional code.

That's to say, the actual implementation details don't concern me too much. In the same way a junior developer would code the solution in a different, and likely much more verbose way to me, but if it solves the business needs, and works, then it's not my job to rewrite their code. Likewise, if the task is to transform some data, it really doesn't matter what language the solution is, so long as it works (obviously you can get into the question of maintenance, but each case is unique).

My point: it's not a hill I care to die on.

On that note, I genuinely think we, the web community, need to back off shaming other developers for their choices. Regardless of whether it's using an LLM or using React, or Tailwind, or jQuery. It's an ugliness that doesn't sit well whilst trying to create an open and progressive community. I'm certainly guilty of this and I'm trying to get better.

There's so many people that aren't the hard core tech bros pushing an agenda, and whom just want to make things. I recently heard of a new developer who wanted to share their web site with their peers in a "show off your work" channel. The channel was intended to be supportive, but because they had used React and hosted on Vercel, they held it back for fear of shaming. They weren't there banging a drum about how others should use these options, but just that they were chuffed to have made a thing, and yet we'd made them feel that they couldn't.

The reason I've never managed to publish those earlier mentioned drafts is for fear of ostracising myself from my peers. I'm sure I'll be fine (I'm a big boy after all), but it's just a weirdness that we've made for ourselves.

</gets-off-soap-box>

My ethical position on AI companies

By "AI" companies I'm referring to OpenAI, Anthropic, Twitter (or Grok, or whatever the hell it's supposed to be), Microsoft, Google and probably Amazon. The companies that a driving data centre development across the globe.

In short, it's fucked.

The greed is grotesque and the ruin they're laying to waste is heartbreaking. In reading Empire of AI I came to understand the real impact on the communities the data centres really have.

I struggle to reconcile the term "theft" with the mass training on public content, but it's semantics that I'm struggling on. The reality is that we, the people whose words make up the web, were taken on an unprecedented scale, and zero credit was given - let alone consent (though our content was always designed to be ingested in different ways - RSS aggregators being one such example).

Then this content was used to create unimaginable sums of money for the super rich and none of this was returned to the authors, again, not even a thank you.

I really do detest these companies (at different levels, at different times of the month), but I wonder if it's because I've got more of an understanding, because by comparison, I don't actively detest airline companies or oil companies for that matter. Those are "background bad".

This does live within me as a constant tension with my current LLM usage.

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So that's it. More of a brain dump mixed with some of my feelings on our community. I've no doubt this will change, and possibly within the next 12 months given how quickly the state of the world is changing.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log