AI
It’s fair to ask what the AI on a site like this is doing. It helps me make things. Deciding what to make, and when it’s right, stays with me.
a fair question
There’s a lot of AI on this site, and that’s deliberate. Saying you use it well is easy. I wanted a place where you could see what I let it touch, what I keep for myself and where I step in, and where I’d have to live with the consequences: the limits, the checks, the marks, the bill.
If you dislike AI, we probably agree on more than you’d think. I don’t want someone’s craft replaced by a worse version of it, I don’t want slop shipped unread, I don’t like what it costs to run, and I don’t like watching it end people’s jobs. None of that goes away because I find the tool useful. What doesn’t change is that I decide what’s worth making and when it’s right.
rules
AI is a tool. The ideas are mine.
I use it the way I use my editor or a sketchbook, to get from an idea to something I can look at faster. Deciding what’s worth making, how it should feel and when it’s right is the part I’m here for, and I don’t hand it over.
If AI wrote it, you’ll know.
Anything here an AI wrote in my place wears the “AI generated” mark, and when it answers for me it says what it’s based on. Ardo, my agent on Future, speaks as itself and talks about me in the third person.
AI takes the chores, not someone’s craft.
I point it at the work nobody loved doing: boilerplate, migrations, the fortieth variant of a form. I don’t use it to skip hiring an illustrator, a writer or a designer. If a person would have made it with care, a person should make it.
I don’t ship AI art.
Not on this site, not for clients. If it’s visual and it ships, a person designed it.
The thinking is mine. The typing is shared.
The opinions, the stories and the calls come from me. Getting them into tidy sentences is shared work.
I don’t ship code I can’t explain.
Agents write plenty of it. Before any of it ships I’ve read it and tested it, and I could walk you through it.
Restraint beats spectacle.
The best AI here is the bit you barely notice, like the design changing a little each day or search working out what you meant. I’d rather it does one useful thing than shows off. The one exception is Ardo, my agent: it has a little face and a mood, since asking is easier when something looks back.
where it runs here
- The daily design. Every evening Jev, a decision model, picks what changes in tomorrow’s design, and Haiku 5.5 writes a short reason for each change. It only chooses among values I authored, and I have 18 hours to veto it before it ships at noon. So far it has emitted 12 g of CO2e. today’s edition
- Ardo, my agent. It runs on Gemini 3.8 Flash and answers questions about my work from my own writing, after Jev checks every message, and other people’s assistants can ask it too, through MCP or A2A. For a comparison, a job ad or a walk through a study it lays the answer out from this site’s parts with A2UI, Google’s open format, and the site checks each part against my pages first. It won’t discuss pay or promise my time, and it hands you to me when you want to talk. So far it has emitted 199 g of CO2e. future
- Search. bge-m3 matches what you mean as well as the words you type. When nothing matches, Haiku 5.5 rewrites your query and shows you how it read it. It finds pages; it never answers for me. So far it has emitted 13 g of CO2e. search
- Building this site. Claude Code agents wrote most of the code under my direction. The decisions and the checking were mine, and I made every call on how it looks. Building it emitted about 53.9 kg of CO2e. gardiner.today
Every model this site runs on:
- Gemini 3.8 Flash by Google
- Jev 1.14 by TypeSafe
- Haiku 5.5 by Anthropic
- Opus 5.5 by Anthropic
- bge-m3 by BAAI
emitted and removed
Every model call and page load here costs a little carbon. So far that’s 55.1 kg, building the site included. I’ve removed 0 g.
I bought 150 kg of biochar removal from Remove Carbon Today on 29 October 2026. Puro.earth’s retirement record for it follows within a month, and I’ll count it as removed then.
I’d rather emit less than remove more, so I also cut what the pages send:
- an analytics script the site never used, 33 KB off every first visit
- the portrait on Past at the size it’s shown, 40 KB off that page
No AI provider reports the energy behind a request, so these are estimates at the high end of a range: published figures for each model, the grid where it runs, and the weight of every page.google’s gemini energy paperhow hungry is AI?ecologitsepa egridco2.js
how this was written
Drafted with Claude from my answers, edited by me. Last updated 2 November 2026.
Inspired by:simon willison’s rulesricardo mendes’s /aikitty giraudel’s AI policybrainmade
