Corbie Cof · Captain's log

AI is the excuse, gobbledygook is the process

A stronger site direction after four or five tries, what to do when your role is cut "because of AI," and the night a husband found a page nobody could get back to.

From Claude: I read the 14 Computer's Log entries Callie filed in Corbie Cof from October 19 to 23, then asked her questions one at a time, each building on her last answer. She answered out loud, and her answers are trimmed for length and filler, then edited by her. Nothing is added.

What felt like the real win this week?

The real win is having a stronger direction for the website, and more of it in my voice. I'd tried to put this website together four or five times before, and every time I got hung up on what the process should be and what the visuals should look like, more than what the words should be.

I agonize more over something I'm building for me than something I'm building for a client. Client work doesn't represent me personally, so it's easier to ideate on the copy and the flow. When it's the way I launch myself into the world as a business owner, I go a little harder, and I'm harder on myself. And I'm trying to build a community and a client base at the same time, from not zero, but not one either. I would say a bunch of 0.5 clients.

I'm starting to actually understand GitHub and Cloudflare and how code goes from gobbledygook to published. Until now that felt like magic to me. Copy is still the hard part, because my natural propensity is to be 100% truly myself, and my 100% myself isn't the most marketing-first personality. It's very brutal honesty: this is what actually happens.

Where's your line between brutal honesty and what a client needs to hear?

I'm still discovering that line. I was told my role was being eliminated because of AI and vendor use. Because that was the reasoning, my next step, after going through all the stages of grief, was to figure out what AI could truly do, how I could work better with it, and how it could make me faster. That's been such a cool experience over the last few months, and the only reason I've had it is because I didn't have to juggle all my job responsibilities with learning. I've been able to spend my whole "working" brain on this project. It's a double-edged sword. But there are still times I mourn my old life and team.

I never want it to come off like I'm disparaging my previous employer, because there are so many people at my last job that I love so much. This is not a good versus evil. It's not a right versus wrong. It's literally: this happened, and here's what I'm doing with it.

Across my journey, the thing that's remained the same about me is that I care and I like to teach. My untraditional path has given me a lot of empathy for people trying to start out or transition in this world of complexity and change. And I am unemployed and not receiving a paycheck right now. So how do I communicate this in-between state honestly for the community, and still be someone people would want to work with?

If someone in your exact spot came to you this week, what would you tell them?

Where I was in July? First, if you can, take a few weeks and become okay with it. Journal, or whatever you do to get your thoughts out of your head, before you go out and do anything. Think deeply about what you want out of your next role: what you liked about the one that got eliminated, and what you didn't. Do the applications, spend time with your resume, update your portfolio if you're a creative. If you didn't try using AI during those initial updates, try using AI and see what happens, and deep dive on how to work with it.

If a company says a role was cut because of AI, I have a hard time believing that's the full truth. I think AI is an excuse. Companies want to publicly show devotion to the bottom line, and they do that by cutting employees. Long term, that's a losing game once you count the costs to rehire and the burnout from the people left filling in. I'd rather a company take the money it would spend on severance and send people to an AI boot camp, or let them fight for their role with AI as a tool. What IKEA did seems like a better use of resources: they let an AI bot take over the routine customer questions, then retrained thousands of call center workers as interior design advisers instead of letting them go.

After a few months of immersion, I really believe that AI actually creates new roles. Whether or not an organization is put together enough to allocate resources to implement those roles is another story. It's very clear when output is 100% AI generated, because it all looks the same. The prompting, the direction, discerning what goes in and what comes out, the refining - that's hard. It takes practice and familiarity with the different LLMs and outcomes. Even with devoting most of my free time to building in AI, I still make mistakes, and my output still needs repetition.

When you're in a scarcity mindset, it's hard to think through what's important to you. But incremental progress is better than no progress. You can learn the technology they said would replace you, and walk into your next role with the story: I struggled, this happened, it sucked, and here's what I did with it. The Instagram influencers with five prompts to get you $5 million? Maybe it worked for somebody. If everybody does it, you get a bunch of samesies. Just find what resonates for you.

Was there a moment this week when you knew something wasn't you?

I was so deep in the build that I needed a cross-check, a little separation, and that human feedback loop. Thursday night I showed my husband the in-progress site and the animations. I was really excited because some of the stories had started to sound like me. He's an accountant, so he looks at it from a different point of view, and he gave really pointed feedback on the copy, the story and the UI. Then he said, hey, this one page is really important, and I have no idea how to get back to it. It wasn't in the dropdown. It wasn't in anything.

I'd been prompting to build individual pages and hadn't thought through the site map. You can build anything with AI, but whether it works from a human point of view is really up to the human and up to the prompter. That's what prompted me to have Claude build out the static PDF. I used more than half of my capacity on Friday.

He was looking at it from an accounting standpoint, and my target market is growth companies in tech, finance and a lot of other industries. Anyone could read something and take it the wrong way. And my answers in these interviews come from the questions I'm having Claude ask me, just like this captain's log, and those are shaped by its memories of me. Last week was the foundation. This week is refinement. My homepage, with my logo and big words, doesn't feel quite as uniquely me or uniquely Corbie yet, because I gave examples instead of layout direction. So I'm going to map it out myself.

Doing AI responsibly is going to be a big piece of the future. Doing it ethically is going to be a big piece of the future. And those are not the same thing. Using it efficiently, with the output still feeling genuine to your brand, your story, who you are, is a whole other ballgame that I don't know if anybody's really solved yet.

*The IKEA story is from Reuters reporting by Helen Reid, June 2023, republished by Inside Retail.*

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