Why I Write When AI Already Knows the Answer

I have always been a writer. I haven’t kept all my writing, but I’ve always enjoyed it. Many of my recent blog posts are topics that are easily answerable by AI. I’ve asked myself, why write these posts when an AI can already answer these questions?

Why I Write

I write to understand. To explore. And to see things from a new perspective. My writing isn’t about telling people how things work so much as it is about taking readers on a journey with me. In my post about choosing a managed Postgres instance, I could have answered the question in the title in one sentence: I decided on a managed Postgres instance because it is more reliable and has better data retention guarantees.

But that would have been boring, and an AI could have told you that easily.

Writing that post was, for me, about taking readers on a journey and helping myself understand the choices I made. I write to understand myself, to explore the choices I’ve made, and to learn if there are better ways of doing things.

As I write, new ideas come to mind, and I ask myself new questions about the code and infrastructure choices I made. I research as I write to confirm my choices and verify my assumptions.

AI Already Knows the Answer

I use AI tools for all my development workflows. I type paragraphs more than I write code these days, and I spend more time reading code than I do writing it. AI tools have brought back the joy of making things because I can iterate, make mistakes, and recover quickly. I even watch AI agents make mistakes for the sole purpose of learning about those mistakes and the rabbit holes they lead to.

AI agents can provide great answers and excellent guidance. But they’re not always correct. And they rarely have the context of the whole application. Even in a small project like willow.camp, I had to coax the agent to look in the right places to understand what we were working on, and I had to remind the agent about the intended outcome.

AI Already Knows the Answer, but it also knows 5 or 10 other somewhat correct answers that might apply to different situations.

Had I asked an AI, “Should I use a managed instance?” it would probably say, “Yes,” with some caveats. The decision is still up to me because I know how I want willow.camp to work.

I write because understanding the full context of the project is essential to making good technical decisions.