AI / LLM
I’ve been working with LLM based AI for a couple of years now. I like it a lot, under very specific circumstances. However, I am coming from the perspective that these technologies should be approached with nuance and caution. In this section, I’ll give you some insight into what technologies I’m using and experimenting with and the various concerns and issues I’ve had (at the time of this writing at least).
Development
GitHub Copilot in VS Code is my daily driver. I’m using Claude Sonnet for anything involving design, writing, fact checking, etc. For anything involving infrastructure, security or refactoring, I use GPT-5. I’m experimenting with tiered strategy for token efficiency, due to the tokenocolypse over at GitHub Copilot.
I’m also testing Zed as an alternative to VS Code. I don’t think it’ll fully replace it as my main go-to, but it’s starting to fill a kind of niche in my workflow, and I find I have it open all day.
Cline
Before I moved to GitHub CoPilot, I was a Cline user. I still think it’s great and go back to it occasionally. I still love to test local models, and Cline is great for pulling those in from LM Studio or Ollama and making them agentic. I switch models all the time, so it’s kinda pointless to mention them here… although I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of Qwen 3.5 9b @ 8q.
As an aside, I’ve recently been testing AI plugins for Obsidian. I don’t love them so far, but what I have had some luck with is opening my Obsidian Vault as a folder / project in VS Code, then running Cline connected to a small model through LM Studio to essentially chat with my Vault. This allows me to pull a lot of different data from my own notes without adding another plugin to Obsidian.
Gemini Cli
This is pretty new as of this writing, so I’ve only gotten to use it a little. It’s pretty good, I have to say. I think this fits into my workflow in an odd way. See, sometimes I want to work on an idea I’m having or quickly fix a thing I just noticed in a project I’m not really working on currently. I can open up a terminal in whatever directory I’m in, and immediately get to work on a thing without setting up a new project, environment or etc. That has value… I think.
Illustration
Okay, this one is tricky. There are a lot of very valid concerns when it comes to generative AI in creating artwork. I don’t have a lot of need for AI in my illustration currently, but I have been experimenting on using it for ideation, color balancing and tools like generative fill for better cropping… things like that. I’ve also been experimenting on training AI (through LoRAs) to use my own artwork to ink my own art using my own style. Is that ethical? I dunno man. It’s a complicated, messy world… but still amazing.
ComfyUI
This is my AI image generator / editor of choice for now. It works really well on my local machine with just 12g of VRAM. I chose this over Invoke on the strength of Qwen Image Edit, which as of this writing only works in Comfy (it’s pretty great). I still use Invoke for anything involving Pony.
Affinity
Affinity Photo and Designer are my current choices for illustration work. They’ve recently added a few AI features that I’ve played with a bit. I had thought that Affinity would be adding tools similar to what they have at LeonardoAI, since they were both acquired by Canva, but I haven’t seen that happen yet.
Update: Affinity combined their apps into one application and made it free… less than a year after I purchased the suite. Nice. Anyway, they’re doing a whole subscription thing through Canva for their AI features, which are not particularly compelling to me at the moment. We’ll see what they roll out in the coming weeks, though.
AI Overview
This is the main AI page, where you’ll get an overview of how and when I currently use AI tools: AI / LLMs
Getting Results
This is a rolling document talking about my experiences trying to get good results with some of these tools
Ethical Concerns
Here’s a page discussing the many (many) cancerns around the use of AI. Like all these pages, it’s a work in progress: AI: Ethical Concerns
Policies
This is a section of my policies page, outlining how I use AI in my work and more specifically on this site: AI: Policy
Visit Dialogistic Industries for more information. It’s my AI workflow consulting company for small and medium sized businesses who want to augment, not eliminate human judgment and creativity in their operations. Providing workflow architecture and AI frameworks without massive overhead.