In publishing, a colophon is a brief statement containing information about the publication of a book — Wikipedia

 

Overview

tl;dr This site itself was vibe-coded (with Claude Code); The fiction, observational, and hobbiest content is all by me, and only me; The Pretensions involve varying degrees of collaboration with Claude Code for discussions and research, but the final wording and tone is all me.

By Chris Gathercole (fiction, Pretensions)

There was, what turned out to be, a fascinating discussion, as we (me’n’Claude) dug into the angst-ridden new world of provenance of content, and specifically dealing with “Was it AI wot done it? No? Really? Don’t believe you.”

The revival of this blog, as a collection of disparate collections of writing, was an excellent, ‘real’ scenario to be considering.

To summarise brutally, it seems there something like agreement on:

  • be explicit, and clear
  • don’t apologise

And hence this colophon, which is reaching epic, article-scale proportions, rather than the original intent: a short, sharp info piece.

The Fiction and other Creative Writing

All of the fiction posted on this site was written wholly by me. In fact, most of it dates back to a time when there was no other option beyond asking a friend.

The hobbyist and observational blog posts, likewise.

All me, and the joy of writing. Oh, and the time-pressures of a 48hr flash fiction competition.

See Predicting the Present and children’s stories for more details about their respective creative origins.

As for what happens next (with me and fiction), this is where the debate gets interesting and a lot more nuanced. The situation will be made clear as and when.

So far, there is no ‘next’, yet. If/when it happens, I think I can claim I will be the toughest person to convince about the validity of any use of AI at all. My fiction is deeply, personally, me. Anything that messes with that is basically not acceptable, even to the point of me doing no more fiction as a consequence.

The Pretensions

The ‘professional’, work-related posts are very much a collaboration between myself and a couple of different AI systems. I’m making no claim of “100% human!” in this tranche of content.

I’m trying to achieve the best understanding I can of a topic, present it in a comprehensible way, with no egregious gaps or assorted misses or misunderstandings, in my own voice. Something that I can be proud of. Definitely not something I lazily offload in its entirety to ChatWhatever and unthinkingly click SEND.

The wording is (almost) all mine. The tone definitely is. I favour the spittle-inflected rant, the borderline rude, angry old man shouts at clouds, approaches. I still enjoy the writing part.

I have found a great delight in achieving a “greater than the sum of the parts” feeling from my AI-enhanced discussions, particularly with Claude Code. Once you coerce Claude (Opus) into not immediately trying to build things, and settle into discussion mode, bouncing ideas off Claude, spin off research, summarising, fan out, fan in, etc, all being captured in a discussion doc… well, the resulting discussions leave me feeling better informed and thinking more clearly about whatever the topic was (or turned out to be).

There are numerous little rituals we have collaborated towards which leave me feeling confident(ish) that I’m not being led astray. This is vibe-discussing (as no-one is calling it) and I am very happy with it. Would recommend.

These Pretensions posts are by the best me I can achieve with the current tech. I stand by them. Mistakes are mine to own. The arguments and points within are what I find personally relevant, interesting, and provocative. I would love to discuss any of these face-to-face with anyone who cares.

There will be a post about this.

The Site

Initially, and many years ago, this was a personal exploration of the possibilities of static site generators. GitHub Pages, and Jekyll, were chosen largely because the “free website” aspect, and that it was based on Ruby, my then favourite language.

Years passed, my home pcs changed, and it became more and more awkward and time-consuming to keep a local build of the site running, which remains a weakness of Ruby, sadly. Until I couldn’t (be bothered), and we had reached full stagnation.

Personal preferences had changed, and I was no longer interested in the minutiae. I just wanted it, or something to work. Some desultory investigations into upgrading, or switching to a new SSG, ensued, but nah. Too much of a faff. Stagnation continued.

And then vibe-coding became a thing. And Claude Code, in particular. One evening, in about 30mins, we had the local site build running, and then an hour later (ish) we had upgraded (as far as the seemingly not-for-much-longer Jekyll approach would allow), tweaked, and deployed to live. Fan-bloody-tastic.

Full of enthusiasm, mainly because I no longer have to care about the details, we have extended and restructured the content architecture to import my LinkedIn articles.

And here we are.