At Orbital Alchemists, AI is part of how we work. This is the statement behind the short mentions on our pages: what we use it for, how the output is controlled, and why we think not using it would be the bigger mistake. First, the what. We use AI to speed up the making of things: first drafts of articles and documentation, research on difficult topics, coding (certain elements) and this website, and the admin that nobody sees but everybody has to do. It also gets used as a thinking partner. Explaining our problem to an extraordinarily patient listener and having it pushed back on us has a way of sharpening (OUR) idea, even when the machine contributes nothing you keep. ...

Artificial intelligence is an amplifier of existing human intelligence. With AI, the rungs of the intelligence ladder only get further apart, not closer together. It doesn’t miraculously allow an unmotivated individual to become the CTO of their own tech startup with minimal effort. If the hurdles stemmed from an individual’s inability to comprehend complex problems, those hurdles will still exist, no matter how well the AI tries to explain them. Even if they somehow found themselves running that company, they wouldn’t understand what they had built, how the pieces fit together, or what to do next. ...