I have a long-running interest in taking technology that is either old, or underpowered, and pushing it as far as I can. I have fond memories of my EeePC 701 from the mid-2000’s, with it’s 4GB of storage, and trying to figure out how to make it do something useful (I think I got Skype working on it). A later edition, the EeePC 1000HA, came with a bit more power, but running Windows XP in 2008. I managed to get that running a version of Photoshop, which could take ten minutes to save a PSD, but it worked, and at the time that was all that mattered.
More recently, I’ve been slowly nursing a 2013 Macbook Air to life. Its battery is failing, it only has 128GB of storage, but running Ubuntu 24.04 has been pretty smooth. I’ve turned it into my personal, non-tech laptop, mainly for writing and browsing the internet. I do have Zed installed, along with the latest LTS version of Node, so that I can make adjustments to my personal site, but it’s never going to be where I do my main tech work (that still falls to my trusty M1 Macbook Air).
Yesterday, I had my first Linux kernal panic. I’m kind of amazed that Linux hasn’t previously thrown that curveball at me, but when the purple screen popped up I thought that maybe the hardware had been fried due to the battery going out. It really doesn’t like to be put in sleep mode, and in a hurry I had closed it without turning it off, so it was a reasonable theory in my head.
Being that we’re in 2026, and AI has been adopted across the tech ecosystem, I had two options: use AI to try and solve my problem, or do it the old fashioned way and hit up a search engine. And since I am of an age where search engines were cool, I opted for the second option, and found this blog post by Imad Saddik that matched exactly the issue that I was having, and was a pretty cool website on top of that!
I followed the instructions and was able to quickly resolve the issue, uninstalling the kernal version at fault. Success! And as a bonus, I have now experienced one more semi-common issue with Linux, and feel more confident in fixing it in the future.
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I said that I’ve been doing some experimentation with AI just to have an idea of what’s going on. I’ve given it tasks both simple and complex, and one thing I can tell you from my experience is that whatever command or directions it offers, it doesn’t stick in my brain. When I’m using AI in this way, I am getting something done, but I’m not learning, not growing as an IT professional or software engineer. This is not an unknown experience, and is in fact what I was talking about in that last post I wrote. When we turn over the wheel to AI, we don’t just stop thinking, we stop learning.
Tech companies, of course, want you to feel that AI is helpful for your learning or work, and are trying to find ways to make it more helpful, such as note takers, learning tutors, or coding assistants. And of course, they can provide value, and they do give you results. The question is not always, “does this thing do what it says it does,” although that is a very important question for any AI-focused app. The question should be, “what tradeoffs am I making by using this tool instead of another method?”
As an example, we don’t say that you should only use paper and pen to write, and that computers are the bane of written existence. But we do say that typically, handwritten notes or journals have a better chance of sticking in your brain than something you type. That’s a tradeoff: do I want to write fast, or do I want to remember what I wrote?
This same tradeoff is something that needs to be considered when deciding whether to reach for AI or not. If you’re going to reach for AI, you are passing up learning opportunities, moments of struggle, and breakthroughs. You’re disregarding the muscle memory that comes with doing those mundane, repetitive tasks, or the years of experience that when put together make you exceptional at your job.
Again, I’m not telling you how to do your job. I am not a purist on this topic by any means. But I would rather make a mistake and learn from it than have a computer ensure I never make another mistake again, because to me, learning and growing is what makes life have meaning.
Keep trying. Keep struggling, failing, picking yourself up again.
Keep learning.
