Having entered the frothing, bubbling water of AI very gingerly in the early days, I'm now plunging in on a rather frequent basis! I do, however, take plenty of precautions:

  • I never use Google's 'AI Overview'. In fact, I have a browser plugin that carefully stops me seeing it in my search results. Google's Gemini has traditionally been rather poor when compared to the competition, and I'd much rather use a system that I select, that's not paid for by advertising, on the occasions when I actually want to use one.
  • For anything vaguely important, I never trust what it tells me without checking it. It can be a great search engine, but always ask for externally-verifiable sources.
  • I pay for Claude - the £15+VAT per month subscription - and that has been plenty for my needs so far.
  • I don't run anything directly on my machine with general access to my computing world. If it's working on my own code, data or documents, I run it in a container where I allow it only to see the bits of the filesystem it needs, with a firewall which stops it talking to the outside world except to places I explicitly allow. (For those interested, I'm a big fan of using 'dev containers' in VS Code and always run it within one of those. It keeps everything nicely encapsulated.)
  • I don't do very 'agentic' things. I ask it to do something and wait for a response. An 'agent', as a crude approximation, is when you say 'Do this and keep working on it or retrying it until you succeed'. In other words, 'Carry on without me'. Though powerful, this can also become very expensive very quickly!

Despite (or perhaps because of) my caution, I've recently been very impressed.

Claude is, of course, now exceedingly good at almost anything software-related, and that's my main use. Paul Dix, the CTO of InfluxData, wrote an article this week entitled "The End of Programming", in which he talks about the relative scale of machine-generated vs human-generated code that we're already seeing, and this is only the start. I'm starting to feel that I retired at almost exactly the right time; that the demand for 'artisanal software' may well become a niche thing soon!

But, going back to Claude, I've also been impressed when asking it non-software things like, "Here's a PDF listing publicly-accessible boat slipways. Could you plot them on a map for me?" Actually, an even more useful variant of this was in the spring, when we were travelling through France in our campervan. We wanted a veterinary practice that could issue an EU pet passport to our UK-resident spaniel, and we had a web page listing a large number of possibilities, along with their addresses, in French towns we had mostly never heard of. The list was unsorted, but plotting the addresses on a map made it easy.

Or, this weekend, having a wife who needs to file tax returns in the US as well as the UK, I've been asking it complex questions about the likely US tax implications of various recent and upcoming financial plans. It's been far more knowledgeable about transatlantic tax than either our UK advisor or our US accountant. What it told us is likely to be painfully expensive, but not nearly as much as if we had gone on for another decade without knowing it. (A hint, if you know any US expats living in the UK who haven't yet discovered this: ISAs are not tax-free for them.)

Imagine the manual labour involved in, for example, taking a dozen UK account statement PDFs, extracting the list of investments bought and sold from each one, working out the gains in each case and how long each investment was held, taking into account that the gains need to be worked out in US dollars using the exchange rate appropriate on the day of each transaction, so a UK loss is sometimes still a taxable US gain... and then summarising all of the results in a nice Excel spreadsheet... You see why I'm a fan.

So my big worry now is this...

Before long, the AI providers are going to have to start charging us what it actually costs them to provide the service. (Well, presumably a fair bit more than that, if they want to make a profit!) I'm making the most of what I can do with Claude now because I suspect that, before too long, my £15/month subscription is going to turn into something I can no longer afford in my retirement. The current offerings are just a loss-making gateway drug to get us hooked.

The alternative, of course, as everywhere else on the Internet, will no doubt be free services which make money from you and your data by including product placements, subtle political biases, or downright advertisements, and by selling your data to others. And because it will cost them a lot more to provide the service than a Gmail, Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp account, so the exploitation of the user -- that's you -- will need to be a lot more profitable...