The garden so far: how do I keep the weeds away from my writing
On the tension between cultivating a tidy digital garden and letting the chaos of ideas coexist. How AI-assisted growth pulls at the time and attention I'd rather spend writing.
Bit of a weird side-step, but as using this digital garden more and more, I get a sense of having to battle the AI to keep this place tidy and above all, mine.
Even when I’m writing here, in this completely blank space, I can’t help but feeling an impending sense of AI chaos in the background. Or perhaps the underground. The underground processes are growing organically, so there’s no 100% certainty that they work the way I think they work. But the time they take up in my mind, draws from the time I’m actually here, writing and thinking.
For example, I checked my templates for the different post types, and noticed that they don’t all share the same set of common core metadata. Yet, on surface level, everything looks fine. My natural instinct is to do some gardening: refactor, reorden, filling missing gaps, knowing my content, making sure the area is clean and orderly again.
So rather than writing, I turned to Claude Code to align the templates. Basically weeding away everything that AI helped grow as a result of my own ideas.
Same for field notes: these are mostly autogenerated-but-supervised experiments in a project. But there’s a lot of them already, and to be honest, I haven’t read all of them. All kinds of content that came from my own ideas; ideas that I planted but never came back to to check. Honestly, this is what my own, physical garden looks like as well :-)
A question that I’m asking regularly, is how do I want to relate to this phenomenon? How do I stop myself from generating more ideas and more content? How does my own head handle this state? I’m perfectly fine with living with a constant idea brainstrom in my head, so why does it feel so chaotic on paper?
Do I want to have a highly cultivated English garden? Or do I allow some of the chaos to just coexist? The beautiful vs the sublime — the ordered and pleasing versus the vast and overwhelming.