I wrote every one of the 99 posts before this one by hand. The last of them went up in February 2022, about nine months before ChatGPT came out. Three of them mark periods of my life, so here they are before I get to the point.

During my PhD in Victoria I got hooked on Hexastix, sculptures of interlocked sticks, and in 2011 I wrote up how to make one.

A Hexastix of orange, red, purple and blue sticks hanging in sunlight, with its hexagonal shadow on a white wall
A Hexastix and its shadow, 2011.

As a postdoc in Durham I taught myself to paint so that I could paint the Petersen graph, and it took about 40 practice paintings to get to the final five.

A grid of eleven practice watercolours of the Petersen graph in blues, greens, yellows and oranges
Practice paintings of the Petersen graph, 2014.

In 2016, while preparing for job interviews, I solved a practice question in 10 minutes and then spent two days implementing and benchmarking 9 sorting algorithms.

Today an AI would do most of those two days of work. In coding and in writing, execution isn't the bottleneck any more. The hard part is deciding what to build. So what makes a blog post interesting to me now is the idea behind it, not the effort that went into writing it.

I expect the posts here to lean that way: an idea, built and written up with AI's help.