For the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with using LLMs and generative AI for software development: I want to ensure my decisions are well informed and rooted in an understanding of the technology. For the time being at least, I’ve concluded that I prefer designing and writing code by hand, and believe that it leads to significantly higher quality, and more sustainable software—the stochastic parrot is altogether too apparent in my usage. Frankly, that learning is a huge relief when contemplating a technology as ethically compromised and environmentally destructive as AI.

While I plan to write more about my experiences and observations, I’d first like focus on something more practical. Prompted by Janus Cycle’s Personal Response to AI Psychosis—a collection of musings on how AI is changing our creation process—and an awareness that AI generated code has crept into a handful of my projects, I’d like to start practicing ‘responsible disclosure’. From now on, you’re going to start seeing links entitled ‘AI’ in the footer of my projects and apps. These pages will state clearly if and how AI has been used in each project and, just like the privacy policy and license pages I publish for all my projects, I intend to add these declarations to everything I create.

Since I do not intend to make significant further use of AI, these declarations will be short for most of my projects, looking something like the one on this website:

All content on this site is human-authored. It was created on operating systems (macOS, iOS, and Linux) known to be developed in part using AI. Services such as Claude were used for research and as search proxies.

This clearly states that the act of creation was exclusively human, while acknowledging the growing presence of AI tooling and the changing face of the Internet.

For some projects—like the Little Luggable—you’ll see something more nuanced:

Generation

No AI was used in the creation of the Little Luggable hardware designs, and all photographs, images, and text used in the project, and on this website are human-authored.

Some AI tooling was used to generate support scripts for this website. This code has been reviewed thoroughly and its use is limited in scope. Source code created using AI is clearly marked and no copyright or license is asserted for these files.

docs/assets/js/

• model-home.js—JavaScript to animate the 3D model transition back to its home position

scripts/

• blender-materials.py—Python script to create Blender materials
• optimize-model.sh—Bash script calling gltf-transform to simplify GLB models
• recolor-nabla.py—Python script to apply a color palettes to WOFF SVG fonts
• resize-images.sh—Bash script to generate multiple sizes for images hosted on this website

Tools

Little Luggable was created using Autodesk Fusion, on operating systems (macOS and Linux) known to be developed in part using AI. Claude was used for research and as a search proxy.

This distinguishes between the human- and AI-generated aspects of the project, and makes my use of AI for some of the peripheral components clear and explicit.

These disclosures aren’t intended to be political statements—they’re a practical acknowledgement of a changing world, and a mechanism by which people who engage with my work get to make informed choices and form their own opinions about how and what I create. They allow me to be open and honest about my AI use.

My hope is that disclosing will both give me a mechanism to be clear about when I use any new tool, and force me consider carefully the implications of doing so: not only do I need to be able to justify any use of tools like AI to myself, I have to justify it to my user base. These disclosures are intended to align closely with the new EU guidance on AI.

I will add these disclosures organically over time. If you have a pressing desire to see one on a project you use that I’ve not yet got around to, please reach out and ask me directly.