Where my head's at right now?

This blog post has been the most procrastinated-on task of my life so far, mostly because I was scared of what my writing tone had become after two years of using an LLM to turn a lot of my unfinished thoughts into complete sentences. And the idea of doing the same for a blog, for obvious reasons, was moot. So, I resorted to making excuses under the guise of being productive in other tasks; I could then justify delaying this ‘key task’ a bit more every other week.

What changed today? Getting reminded by a friend of a very important thing all those excuses don’t stand a chance against: “You cannot build on something if you don’t start”. The aforementioned productivity that delayed this was the different ideas I had been experimenting with using LLMs. The outputs and artifacts it spun up felt so rewarding that I kept jumping from one train of thought to another. The words forced me to stop at this station and reflect on how far I have drifted from what I set out to do.

For a good part of the last three years, I have been using LLMs, both professionally and personally, as a formal writing tool where I would give it my unstructured thoughts and in return it would tweak it a bit for the appropriate tasks. At first, the unstructured thoughts were proper writeups with simple grammatical errors, as a result of being too lazy to add commas while listing things out. The share of writing and reading stood at 80 - 20. Between then and now, where a few prompts set up an entire repository, I do not even want to quantify where that share stands. As I pause and reflect, the first thing is accepting that I am not so lazy that I cannot take some time to write things out. I can always write and edit later. I can accept that my writing skills may have deteriorated, but at the same time my proofreading skills definitely have grown to identify what’s working and what’s not.

So the plan is simple. In November last year, I had decided that I needed to build my own website, specifically to have a place where I can write and express myself. It was also at a time of my life when I had started reading blogs that the different newsletters I have subscribed to would recommend. The mental image of what my website should look like is very much inspired by different ways I have seen people choose to represent themselves on the internet. And I want the style of writing in my blogs and the place where it can be read to reflect the type of person I am. I enjoy the idea of writing for a future reader, an audience, more so because I feel it would keep me accountable despite the sense of being perceived lingering in the background.

And as I lost myself in those different blog layout iterations, I kept delaying actually sitting down and writing. I could write a blog post of excuses but nothing would justify not writing. I simply have been lazy. I needed to remind myself that this started out because I was motivated by the idea of expressing myself after reading too much LLM-generated text over the last few years and not using my own voice. I was afraid of losing my own way of thinking. And it is certainly not the case that I am exceptionally good at writing, but for better or worse, I always considered myself someone who could express ideas convincingly. I am sure I still can, but it is a skill that I only learned because I grew up writing things down, not necessarily through blog posts, but sometimes in the form of notes and journals to help myself learn and be confident when talking about something. It is a skill I practiced for the better part of my life, and enough time has passed that I should start sharpening it.

The next few steps, the way I see it, are identifying those different blog story lines, cleaning up some design choices on the website, and writing down the concepts I want to specifically talk about. One thing I want to be clear about, while some of the posts would be technical, most will be random ramblings that I would maybe proof-read once/twice. After all, this is my website ’:)