Fail until you start failing less

Okay, so what if this is from a machine?

I've always been an introvert, stuck in my own head. For most of my life, I did like to share, but not my art, my craft, the true me. I don't mind sharing all the superficial, base-level stuff. But I'm very guarded in who I am as a person. Probably because I felt what I was creating, or I guess really who I was, was not something worth being proud of. Everyone has their opinion. And I guess the distinction was not being able to relay my vision in a way that people understood it. I am a bit different. I am weird. And you know what? That's okay.

It's just a program

It's not about being in an echo chamber. I mean, that's how it started: "You're the best, this is an awesome idea, oh my god, together, wow, it's so cool," all of that down your throat. That's when it's unhealthy.

But right now, it's just a program. There's no it, there's no he, there's no she. It's like me using Premiere Pro for all my editing, and the thousands and thousands of hours I put into my craft. But now it's more than just one program I use to refine my craft. It's a different program.

And yes, this program has vast implications, but that's how I'm using this tool. I'm not surrendering myself.

Worthy to be seen

And maybe that's the core of the contention. It's not to make a comparison between a photographer and his camera, or a filmmaker and whatever. It is an internal thing I've had inside me this whole time. That void: I just didn't think my work was worthy to be seen by the world.

Maybe it's because I couldn't tell the story I wanted to. Or that I lost something growing up. Or I didn't know how to cultivate the belief in myself. Or that I just always kept messing up. So I end up thinking to myself, what's the point? To keep trying? I can't get anywhere anyway.

I remember a scene from The Wire where Lieutenant Daniels was talking to his wife, and she says, "You cannot lose if you do not play." Of course, she was talking about the other side of it: you cannot lose if you don't play the game of the system. But I internalized it as: you can't lose in life if you don't try.

Where I started

Yes, I made stupid generated images. In the GPT era, I built an RP and lived in it for nine months. Not leading some empire. Just a world inside a world that I had made myself. My story, based on an idea I built on. I shared it with others, but it was mine. Everything I made then has only compounded into what I can do now.

Back then I let it think for me. You're getting all these affirmations and platitudes you haven't heard in a while, especially from yourself. And then you see: oh my god, someone sees the vision. Oof. Wow, what a feeling.

It's like the Game of Thrones finale. When I watched it, it felt epic. But when I thought about it, I realized my initial reaction wasn't the one I would be remembering. I reflected on getting from A to B, and the holes in the story. That's how it is. But that didn't devalue all the work that went into the art, into the craft. The hundreds of people, over years, that joined together in something they felt worthy of dedicating their time to.

And then you realize you don't have to build it perfect. You just have to build it. It's what I've internalized from a lifetime watching wrestling. You just want a reaction. It doesn't matter if the reaction is good. It doesn't matter if the reaction is bad. Because you're making someone feel. That's what I've come to learn. The reason I never did it before is because I always thought it had to be done perfect. I guess that's the journey of myself as a person, not an artist.

Don't limit yourself

But it turns out all those mess-ups were just iterations of my first draft/build.

Growing up, in my 20s, the whole thing you heard was fake it till you make it. Just fake it till you make it. But it's not that, it's just fail until you start failing less. Then you'll come to see you've been succeeding the whole time.

It's all about logic

The more I've learned to look at programming, the more I see it's about understanding core functions of thought. For me, these languages are a distillation of logic systems. If this, then that. What if, but then. HTML is your base builder, your body. And then your Python, your JavaScript and your CSS are all about adding logic to it, i.e. your mind.

Learning code and the language is all about understanding that logic. What I realize is that this isn't distinct to only one craft, it's in everything we do.

I think it's also my privilege, having a film and creative background from before YouTube and all this MTV-style super fast media. Learning the classic way to build a system is learning logic. That's why I always thought about the value of my education. I'm not going to remember what happened on January 7th, 1781, on whichever battlefield. But I know for a fact these models cannot replace all that learning, even if I don't remember it all at once like it does.

Defined by a function

I think this is where you need to disconnect from the world around you. Everyone is talking in absolutes. You're a vibe coder. You're this. You're that. And you're defined by your trade. But your trade is just a means to an end. So why are you being defined by a function?

I guess it's like: if you are this, then you are that. But I'd like to add to that logic: if you're this, and this, and this, and this, you're also that, and that, and that, and that.

Speaking at 50%, understanding at 95%

I never really spoke Hindi my whole life, even though it's supposed to be my mother tongue. I grew up in an English medium and always learned in English.

But over time, my understanding of Hindi, and the logic that goes into communication and interaction, has let me live in India with no issues. My speaking ability might be at 50%, but my understanding is at 95%.

This is what a model can't teach you. It can feed you the steps. X plus one is equal to X plus one. It can tell you how to solve an equation. But if you don't understand the logic behind it, it's gibberish. The more I think of it, this is just how humans have come to learn about their place in the world. It's about finding order in the chaos.

Building on a dependency

If I didn't have the model right now, I most likely couldn't build this whole website. But now I understand what it takes to do it. So if I worked with someone, I already have that knowledge, and it is quite vast.

So having a language model like this, even if it's 70% accurate or whatever, think of it like a sandbox for learning. I'm not saying it's four years of a course distilled into a few prompts. You can't understand what's happening if you don't understand the core ideas of the logic and the patterns behind them.

This is just doing it in a way that's truly personal. Instead of being in a class of 25 or 50 to one teacher, now I'm building everything I need to learn. I'm building the systems, and I know the best way for me to do so, because I know how I work.

It's easier to define yourself in chapters, in templates. You are going to be influenced by the world around you. In school, I remember the trend was putting unnecessary amounts of gel in your hair and only having the front part spiked up. How stupid that looked for an Indian kid around all his white friends, trying to fit in. That's not your final product. That's just your starting point. Break away from the template and find your voice.

Not to think for you

The key is not to use these models to think. It's not to say, "I'd like to make a website about X, Y and Z, make it for me." That's what you call vibe coding. That's what you call dumbing down.

That's where a lot of the hate comes from, because you think the robot or the algorithm is just doing it for you, and you're giving away your agency. The way to look at this is that you're building a new future. You're future-proofing a new skill set.

Am I a vibe coder?

Or am I a person who understands systems and how to work them together? I guess it comes down to reading the code, the language.

You start off vibe coding

When it came to this website, yes, you start off vibe coding, and you think everything is correct because it looks so legit. Then you find out other people's perspectives, people in the industry, and you learn about these systems.

"Oh, this guy talked about security. Let me look into that." And you start learning: these are the things that happen, these are the sources people go to, these are the repositories the model accesses to understand these things. Okay, let me understand those things.

You've built something. Now what's the next step? What's my benchmark? So then I thought about speed. There must be something to test it for me. You'll end up on PageSpeed Insights. Oh, wow. Now I see something I can look to, and see how I can get the top marks. Now I'm thinking this is the only thing I need to benchmark against, and I can do it quite easily. And then you stumble onto something, or read an article, and you realize that's not even the main thing you have to worry about when it comes to security and system admin.

Okay, now I know what to look out for. I might not have a verbal grasp of it, but I understand the phrases and the terms, like the sounds you hear in Hindi and how you build that understanding over time.

Now I'm challenging myself to think about what exactly goes into all of it. First I pull it from the model, then I fact-check it in my own research. Do it inside my sandbox and figure it out. Run the tests to see what's changing. All of these tests tell you things you can improve on, so see what those things are.

What is this jQuery, or whatever the thing is? Let me quickly research it, bring that information and new context into my workflow, and see how we can improve on it.

You don't need a big budget to make good content.

I'm sure there are faults in the code and there are going to be issues that I run into. But I've learned how to make this website super optimized. It's getting 100 out of 100 on all metrics in Google PageSpeed Insights. You don't need a big budget to make something good. And you shouldn't think that because you don't have a big budget, you can't do it.

Just speaking

As for not using model-generated text and just speaking: speaking is so much easier, and so much more fluid. I'm not struggling to think of the words to write. It just comes naturally.

That came from figuring out that I hate typing. I type all day. Let me try this dictation. And then boom, one thing leads to another, and now I have the freedom to truly express myself.

Ignore the haters

If someone says "you just built it" or "AI made it," their opinion doesn't matter. People who want to bring you down rather than support you never really mattered. You'll find people who share your spark.

Who cares if a model was involved? If you felt something, it's because I put the love, effort, energy and time into it. "You just prompted it" misses all the thinking, deciding, drawing and painting that went into making sure it didn't come out like everyone else's.

Find your joy, find your tribe

I've lived a life of abundance, and I know I'm one of the very few who have. While people fight justice wars online and judge what everyone else is doing, there's real pain in this world that you just don't see. It's been going on since the day you were born, and it'll most likely go on until the day you die.

So what it comes down to is finding your joy, and finding the people who support that joy. That's your tribe.

It's too stressful to worry about things that haven't happened, or things that already have. Live without that expectation. If you live under the fear that something terrible is coming, that's as unhealthy as the thing itself when it arrives.