I'm leaving Pagecord
Dear reader,
If you have been reading my blog for a while, you may have noticed my distaste for AI. Unlike many people, I don’t view it as “just a tool” or a neutral piece of technology. I see its harms surpassing its benefits.
So when I discovered the extent to which Pagecord, my blogging platform of choice, is being developed with the help of an LLM, I started considering leaving the platform.
Last week, I learned that Olly, Pagecord’s developer, has a history of deploying LLM-generated code without confirming its safety. At the same time, while building an import tool, customer’s personal blog posts got exposed to an LLM without consent.
Olly’s response to the criticism sealed the deal for me. While framing the situation as a witch hunt, he brushed off the criticism regarding his use of LLMs in a now-deleted blog post.
All of this is why I have decided to move my blog to Bear, a well-known blogging platform whose developer confirmed to me that he is only using AI to find vulnerabilities in Bear’s code, since the platform is attacked on a weekly basis. This sounds reasonable to me. I don’t care if the development speed is slower as a result if it means I can avoid the extensive AI usage at Pagecord.
I wish I didn’t have to leave, but I don’t see a way around this. I feel like my values don’t match Pagecord’s anymore. Maybe they never did, when considering Olly’s comment on X implying that people should write blogs so LLMs have more training data.
I will transfer my domain name over to Bear after my email subscribers have received this post on Tuesday. Since Bear doesn’t offer a native newsletter feature, I will start sending these by hand. I considered a platform called Buttondown, and while it seemed nice, I didn’t want to trust an additional third-party with your email addresses.
Comments are another thing I have to give up. This one feels especially frustrating since people have been engaging a lot more with my blog posts after I enabled the feature on Pagecord. While Bear supports integrations with options such as Komments and Cusdis, neither has felt like a good fit to replace Pagecord’s native implementation. At least the RSS-feed should continue to work as usual. I will see you at Bear!
Update
I have updated this post to acknowledge Olly’s blog post that clarified the events regarding the customer’s blog posts.
In a new AI page, Olly has provided information about his use of AI in Pagecord’s development. I welcome the initiative. It’s good to hear that these days he checks the code before pushing it to production. 🌔