Wow, I don't think I ever went this long without writing a blog post since this blog exists. What happened? Nothing in particular I think. I'd say it's fatigue resulting from different factors. My job is getting less and less technical and so is my exposure to exciting new tech topics which has been a driver of this blog for many years. Also, as a result of getting older, I feel like I need to better balance my "energy budget" and blogging has been a thing that did not make the cut recently. And finally - which is also the topic of this blog post - AI has changed our lives a lot and kind of left me puzzled about what the purpose or the whole point of this blog should be with this technology at hand.

In the past, I often thought about this blog as my extended memory. Many of the things I wrote here, I also wrote for the purpose that I could look them up at a later stage. If anybody else benefitted from that - well even better. But in a sense, with the omnipresence of AI tools, this has gone away. I'm not googling for tech topics any more or finding myself looking for answers on a StackExchange site, I simply ask AI. So - subconsciously at least - I'm sure this has taken away some of my motivation to put my findings and ideas into writing. Of course, this raises the question of where AI will take its future knowledge from when nobody is creating knowledge and putting out fresh content anymore, but I'm not going down this rabbit hole today.

What I want to write about today, is the future of this blog. Or at least my plans for its future and also my plans for how I'm going to use AI here.

• First, I won't give up on writing and creating blog posts.
• That being said - I can't and won't make promises on how often and in what intervals. This primarily depends on my energy levels and whether I think I have something interesting to share in the first place.
• Most importantly though:
  • The words you are reading here are my own!
  • It's easier than ever to throw a couple of ideas and notes into a prompt and come back with a perfectly polished blog post. That's fine and there are plenty of good use cases for that. This blog is not one of those. This is from me, my ideas, my words.
  • I will use AI for basic syntax and grammar checks and maybe work on the site (i.e. its code) as well. But again: the words are mine.

I realized that I can really draw motivation from that decision. Being another outlet that posts AI-generated content seemed pointless to me. But coming back to the original idea of a blog ... a weblog ... almost like an online diary ... that's something I can see myself doing for years to come. I hope you as a reader will appreciate that as well and maybe it motivates others to take this step as well.

Let's make sure that at least some of the content we produce comes from us. It's our thoughts, our ideas, our words. Let's take them back!