This is a very quick blog post, intended as a note to look back on, or to share with with people quickly - a snapshot of my AI usage in November 2025. It’s likely that this will change rapidly over the next few months and years, so I want to capture a moment in time.
80% of my queries now land in AI, 20% in traditional search engines.
It will be interesting to see how this changes over time!
I fondly remember this quote when I first heard it - and it made me chuckle. However this is such a good reminder of “GIGO” (Garbage In, Garbage Out) that is so relevant in today’s world of AI and especially Vibe Coding.
‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’
Charles Babbage Garbage In, Garbage Out is a principle of systems design, and also common sense, that simply means that if you feed in the wrong questions, clearly you will get the wrong answers.
The problem statement When you’re young, single, without family and with a job that you love, it’s easy to give that a lot of focus and energy. When I was promoted to Principal Solution Architect at work, I was about 12th in EMEA, and the youngest by a long way - in March 2019 at age 32. Soon after that I got married, started a family, COVID happened (!), bought a much nicer house and I would say life got a lot more complicated!
This week was totally normal and routine for me, I’m sitting here on a Friday thinking that it’s been the same as many other weeks I’ve had in my life as a Tech Seller at Red Hat. Enjoyable, busy, varied, etc. However, I am noticing a change in how I go about my week - that change is that more and more of my colleagues are using AI.
On the one hand this is fantastic, the democratisation of AI, led by services like ChatGPT mean that anyone without any technical background or grounding in the principles of AI doesn’t have to worry about HOW any of those services work, they use use them.
This is a blog post written as a summary of notes, following my learnings from an AI course I completed back in 2019 that I feel is still incredibly relevant in 2024]({{ rel ‘../how-useful-way-my-ai-short-course-from-2019/’ }}).
AI is a huge field with an expansive history extending over the last century, it might be easy to be fooled into thinking thay AI was just something we found in the last 5 years. However, the recent surge of interest cannot be ignored - popularized by easy and cheap access to incredibly sophisticated models like ChatGPT.
In 2019 I could see that AI was a technology gaining increasing interest and relevance, and I was keen to get ahead of the hype and start learning more. At the time I was feeling like my day to day routine was getting a bit boring, and too familiar, and I wanted to make sure I had a solid grasp of what I thought would become a fundamental building block of technology for the future, and I decided to take a course on the topic of AI.
James is a "full stack" Open Source enthusiast, who enjoys creating no-nonsense open source software.