Google has a concept called “Readability” which usually means you can write and review code of a certain language in the accepted style. When I first joined Google it seemed bureaucratic but I think it strikes a good balance and the languages I have readability in I feel pretty confident that I can write things that will incorporate the style decisions, and the languages I don’t have it, I don’t have that confidence.
A couple of months ago I had an idea that this concept might be useful at a higher level. Instead of Go or TypeScript, what if there was Readability for concepts like security, or maintainability? I started chatting with AI and eventually ended up on what has been a very enjoyable project. It’s not “readability for maintainability” like I thought, nor is it about certification or iron-clad rules, but it’s become a growing repository of thoughts, stories, and observations. I’ll get into more about the process in the future.
I’ve gone back and forth about sharing it here, not because it’s embarrassing but because of the AI aspect. I think it’s been an absolutely fantastic tool for editing and organizing these thoughts and notes, and prompting me for topics to write on, and I love just being able to write a draft and have it come out as something built a bit better. Much of it is my words exactly, but rearranged or glued together into a better structure.
So far 100% of this blog, including this post, has been hand-written by me, I’ve used AI to review the past few posts and made some revisions based on feedback but none of it was written by an AI. I’m now in a position where my choices are to share AI-assisted content, rewrite it myself to satisfy some arbitrary rule, or not share it at all. I don’t like the last option, and the second option seems kind of foolish, so I’m going with the first one and I’m going to tag these posts as #ai-assist for transparency. Where I’ve only used it for feedback I’ll use #ai-review.
The AI isn’t doing anything a good editor wouldn’t do. All of the thoughts, examples, principles and stories are mine (or credited where due). To me, that’s not slop. I hope people judge the content based on what it’s saying rather than the tools involved, but I respect the sensitivity people have towards these tools and don’t want to misrepresent things.