Matthew Lang

All too often, I would start a new project on GitHub, only for it to gather dust. It’s one of the reasons I moved my personal projects to SourceHut: I don’t need the social interactions GitHub provides. I still have a couple of larger Rails applications that I host on GitHub, using a separate account.

A minor revelation struck me last night when I was trying to merge another pull request for one of these Rails applications. I probably don’t need to merge this pull request or any other pull request. Since I’m the only one with access to the repository, I can skip creating, monitoring, and merging pull requests and simply use git merge when I am ready to merge the branch into the main Git branch.

Why am I even using issues, projects and milestones in GitHub? Again, it’s just me on the repository, and I don’t need to collaborate in the sense that GitHub allows.

The only reason I am left with using GitHub is that the hosting provider my Rails application runs on uses Git to track changes and automatically deploys them to the server when changes are detected. I have it set up to use GitHub.

Suppose I can handle deploys on another Git service or even from my local laptop. In that case, I can switch away from GitHub for this account.

Still, when it’s just you and the repository, you probably don’t need several of GitHub’s features or even GitHub itself. Just a remote Git repo, and there’s plenty of other options out there.

When it comes to AI, I found myself late to becoming a regular user of it. Hesitance has always been one of my traits, and when ChatGPT became a daily buzzword in my RSS feeds, I wondered if I should start exploring its use. I put it off for a few months, and eventually, I found myself with a ChatGPT account. The initial hype surrounding these tools has definitely fizzled out for me, and now I find myself still divided on whether they are helpful or not.

As a software engineer, I find AI tools really helpful. I’m pretty familiar with the various coding tools available from Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI, and I use at least two of these tools daily; in fact, we’re encouraged to utilise these tools. I use them to explain code that I am unfamiliar with, diagnose issues and help with complex problems that my current skill set does not cover.

Outside of my day job as a senior software engineer, though, using AI becomes more of a crutch than a benefit. I have used AI tools outside of my career for several trivial tasks. But over time, I have found myself falling away from these tools and only reaching for them when I absolutely need them. There’s definitely a downside to these tools when you start to depend on them for everything, and it’s for this reason that I try to limit my time with them.

I think it boils down to that old adage, “everything in moderation”. And yes, this even applies to AI for me.