This is 100% handwritten - you can see bunch of grammatical errors from the paragraphs.
So I've stopped writing for a while
This post is a recent update of myself ever since I wrote my last review on one of the most well-written AI book out there by Chip Huyen in 2025. It's been almost ten or eleven months since I stopped writing after this post. I have a few excuses for that, but perhaps the biggest two are:
I have changed my job right at the time I wrote my last article, and since then I've been working pretty intensively. Everyday was a grinding day and I've been quite busy with both of my job and my personal life. I couldn't think of writing a single sentence of technical contents, after all those exhausted hours during day time.
The recent advent of AI and agent development has been a huge demoralizer of my writing articles. If AI knows better, I mean a lot better than you, then why would you waste your time writing mediocre stuff that wouldn't ever be read by human out there (although AI would gladly do so for training their parameters)?
The first issue could be resolved in a matter of time. After all, if the work gets more routinized and systematic, then I don't have to spend too much of my time and energy on that. The real problem is the recent AI revolution. I guess nowadays there are only a few people who are thrilled to create brand new contents because AI is considered to be doing better in the late of 2026.
AI is probably making writing worthless
Not only the texts such as academic papers, articles and blog posts, but any sort of contents on media, like images and videos, are now super easy to create with generative AI tools. And it's getting cheaper in this insanely competitive global market nowadays, so anyone can create a fake AI video with less than a hundred bucks. Quality? You mention it, but every month there are new announcements of AI models, agents, and relevant tools, and the created contents are now hardly distinguishable from the real ones.
Now you get the point. What is the benefit for spending hours in reading and researching on a certain topic and write a article about it? You can simply write a short prompt and AI will generate a well structured article on the topic. On readers' side, now you don't have to type in several keywords on Google and hop around tons of StackOverflow or Reddit pages anymore. It's been a while that Google shows a generated answer by Gemini to your search query at the top of the search result page.
So production cost dropped, and demand is almost going zero. High supply but zero demand. Then here is the question. What is the value in it? For what should I continue writing?
But writing is not only for showing to others
Writing is definitely an action of producing text. However, the value of writing is not only in the resulting product, but also in the process of writing text itself. I am not an expert psychologist or any sort of medical things, but what I feel about the benefits of writing as an engineer are largely these two: tidying up your thought and keeping in touch with the latest trend.
When you write about something, you think about it and talk with yourself, and organize your opinions and knowledges. Say like I write about a new LLM model, then I must bring up how it is good in terms of benchmark, what is its cost, and what technologies are being used under the hood. You make sure you're familiar with these topics and try to analyze the model. Finally, you want to add your own opinion on the model, such that the entire text is now yours and not anyone else's. To recap, you have reviewed what you know and organized the entire thought about the LLM models and the specific model itself. Now you've become a better expert in the LLM models
Moreover, by writing about something, you automatically join the discourse about the topic. You share your idea, get some feedback, rewind your knowledge and thoughts, and revise the text again. This cycle continues until you become happy with your finalized thoughts on the topic. All these communication with the people in the discourse make you stay alert to the topic and the latest news and trends.
Writing will not disappear
People are busy and they are usually messed up with too much things around them. You need to organize your distracted ideas and thoughts, and clearly share them with others. Writing is a very primitive, but also very effective tool that has been with human being for freaking long time. Even in the era of AI, writing will never disappear, because people need it for the sake of themselves.
Top comments (2)
Hey some readers till enjoy wandering around StackOverflow (sometimes) and Reddit even after Google spoon-feeds it to them... 🙃
I'm on your side about the other points! Authenticity seems like luxurious goods nowadays and I do enjoy the goods I've just consumed! Thank you.
Thanks for sharing your thought! Yes, I believe it is only human who can create stories, where AI can only mimic them. We gotta be storytellers.
By the way, I actually also love hopping around the reddit pages and other dev community pages haha 😀 What an old school are we?