PETE//HUEY

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Category: Reflection

What we’re talking about when we talk about AI

Hanging out with friends last Saturday, I asked someone who manages a team in IT about something that I see the BBC have labelled ‘tokenomics’1 (hats off to that subeditor) – how on earth one begins to measure the value of the tokens which companies of all stripes are now budgeting for their employees’ use of AI agents. In his role, he get 300 tokens a day, and every now and again he maxes that. But, as the BBC explain well, there’s no real way to anticipate how many tokens a particular task is going to consume, so budgeting your daily work is tricky at best.

I continue to have a stack of AI-related articles accumulating in my inbox – as you may well also, if you have subscribed to really anything at all in 2026.

I have The Gospel Coalition telling me they’re banning the use of AI in writing articles submitted for publication2 – a line many publications are drawing, though most won’t publish a whole manifesto to that end.

I have Cal Newport gently dismantling the recent publicity-generating stunts around AI agents ‘escaping’ from their sandboxes – an actual expert pouring quite a lot of water on the fire, whilst also drawing attention to some real onrushing issues.3

I have Jon Gruber highlighting this excellent and revealing essay by Nikhil Suresh, where Suresh details what many thinking people suspect – even if big businesses have no use for AI in a particular area, they’re shoehorning it into every possible nook or cranny, because their clients assume it represents some kind of whiggish progress – a sort of, ’10x EVERYTHING’ mentality, even if we’re already seeing some evidence that adding AI agents does not streamline work – it just changes it to new work.4

And I have (via Jason Kottke), David Reichert’s deep dive into a distinction I think we’re struggling to delineate right now, but which is rapidly developing – the gap between what most people think of as AI – which are really free bits of software we can use to generate language responses or images, or even video clips – and the hugely powerful agents which have already transformed programming in business.5

How do we reflect on all this? Well for one thing, it strikes me we need our descriptors to evolve, and some new nouns to be added.

I’ve spoken a lot, and written a little, about the limitations of LLMs, but nevertheless Joe Public will continue to call ChatGPT or Gemini ‘AI’. But if you speak to a coder, they’re using the term to refer to hugely powerful models that they are spending their days speaking to through terminals and deploying for work purposes.

A little randomly, I was on GitHub the other day, looking at the account of someone I know, and noticed that in the last year his daily commits across a range of projects (he leads a design company) have gone from a handful to dozens a day. But of course they have: he’s now able to deploy models to write, test, and iteratively improve what he’s working on at a pace we could only dream of in the days of tapping out every line of code by hand.

We need new names for the models consumers are using, versus the actual revolution that’s happening in the backend of software. I don’t much trust either, although they absolutely have their uses – but I wouldn’t mind the language to talk about them more clearly.

  1. Joe Fay, ‘Tokenomics: Why making AI pay is tricky‘, BBC News, 12 August 2026. ↩︎
  2. Brett McCracken, ‘Our Line in the Sand on AI: TGC’s Missional Opportunity‘, The Gospel Coalition, 5 August 2026. ↩︎
  3. Cal Newport, ‘Did OpenAI’s New Model “Go Rogue”?‘, CalNewport.com, 27 July 2026. ↩︎
  4. Jon Gruber, ‘AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making‘, Daring Fireball, 25 July 2026. See also: Slack; email; every other transformative technology that just ended up generating more administration and less deep work. ↩︎
  5. David P. Reichert, ‘If you haven’t recently used Claude Code, you might not understand where AI is at‘, Substack [Yuck], 3 August 2026. ↩︎

The things that stay with you

A lovely clip from an interview with Ardal O’Hanlon on the Late Late Show, where he reminisces with Patrick Kielty about his recently-deceased father.1 O’Hanlon’s father, the politician and GP Rory O’Hanlon, was not, in his words, the most present due to his tremendous commitments to community and state – but the younger O’Hanlon speaks particularly fondly of the times when, as a child, he was brought along for the house calls.

I have to admit, this resonates deeply with me. My own father, a vet, was similarly constantly on the go, but I have warm memories of climbing in the car and being taken to all sorts of places: when he was still in practice, sat at tables, drinking juice whilst small pets were examined; perched on the end of a cattle crush, watching the dehorning with increasing disgusted; wedged on top of the wall as a group of men ran the herd through the sheep dip.2 Later, when he worked at the meat plant or for the department, Saturday mornings often meant time wandering around the mart, or memorably once getting to go and literally see the sausages getting made.

It resonates now because I work in a role, in local church ministry, where you also spend a significant amount of time in people’s homes, and I too sometimes drag my children along. It is a reminder that, as they have already tried to say, they actually enjoy something of these times. I sometimes feel guilty for bringing them, as if they’ll be bored or uninterested, or as if they might need to be shielded from the realities of real life; but I suppose on reflection, there’s something magical about stepping into that grown-up world when you’re little, and there’s also something magical about being invited into it by your parent.

O’Hanlon connects these times with his own sense of relationship to people; Kielty goes as far to prompt him that he, too, engaged in a type of public service and that may be influenced by his childhood memories. It’s a reminder, too, that no artificial construction or so-called social platform can replace the magic of face-to-face time alongside those who mean the most to you; and that, without the need for extravagant, ‘memory-making’ experiences, there is little that replaces the mundane joy of simply being brought along for the ride.

  1. Around a decade ago or so, a bunch of us happened to see Ardal O’Hanlon doing an afternoon warmup gig for the Galway Comedy Festival – I think there might have been around thirty people squeezed into a tiny room upstairs in the bar, and maybe ten were us rowdies. O’Hanlon was trying out material, opening confessing the bits that didn’t quite work and, in a very meta way, also explaining how he would put the act together for that evening based on what we as an audience were responding to. In person, he seemed exactly as warm and affable as you would imagine, and to be fair to him, the embodiment of what he describes in the clip above. ↩︎
  2. When I was maybe five or six, I famously took a tumble and fell off a wall, rolled across a small bit of yard, and ended up immersed in the tank. I must have been guaranteed mite-free for at least six months afterwards. ↩︎