I'm Back
Ready or not, I'm going to start writing (regularly) again. I hope you'll join me. It should be one wild ride.
It's been awhile.
For nearly four years, I published a new article on this site every day. Some were long. Some were short. Most were about Access, VBA, SQL Server, consulting, twinBASIC, or my random thoughts.
But it was a grind.
And about two years ago, I decided to scale back:
Mike Wolfe
Since then I've tried to publish at least three articles per week:
While I hope those articles have helped keep you informed about other content in the Access ecosystem, the journey of twinBASIC towards its eventual v1.0 release, and (re-)introduce you to some of my favorite past articles, they have not scratched my need to write. And as much as I don't miss the grind, I do miss the creative outlet.
Why I Stepped Back
When I walked away from my daily writing habit, I did it for a few reasons:
- Cover Art: it sounds silly, but I got to where I would spend as much or more time choosing a cover image as I did on writing the article itself; you would think AI would have helped with this (I certainly did), but the ability to generate custom cover art meant my OCD side got to spend even more time obsessing over minor details
- AI Content Scrapers: as more people turned to AI for answers to technical questions–via ChatGPT, Perplexity, or even Google AI search results–fewer humans visited my site for its technical content
- AI-Generated Content: as the marginal cost to generate new content dropped due to the various AI tools, sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter were inundated with so-called AI slop; why try to compete with that?
- Sleep: I wanted to see what all the fuss was about; apparently, there were people out there getting a full 8 hours of sleep every night; I heard it was great, so thought I should give it a try
How I'm Addressing Each Issue
Despite these apparent headwinds, I think now is the perfect time to start writing human-generated content.
- Cover Art: Unsplash will be my friend; as of April 27, 2026, "all content available on Unsplash is created by artists, including photography, 3D renders, and illustrations"; I won't constrain myself by saying all future cover art will be human content, but I will (try my absolute best to) not obsess over finding a cover image that somehow represents or captures the essence of my article's content; instead, cover art will go back to what it largely was when I first launched the site: images that I happen to find visually appealing
- AI Content Scrapers: in this site's About page, I wrote, "My mission is to help Access programmers evolve from writing code to developing software." And if all my writing does is feed future models with my opinions about Microsoft Access development best practices, then I am accomplishing that mission.
- AI-Generated Content: I think humans have gotten tired of reading AI-generated slop; there are creators who use AI to great effect–and, to be clear, I plan on continuing to use AI to generate summaries for my weekly Access and twinBASIC update articles–but most AI-generated content sounds like the same flavor of vanilla ice cream you would get by mixing every known ice cream flavor together, weighted by popularity, straining it through a colander to filter out all the exotic bits, and then dropping it into a special dish that told you how wonderful you are every time you take a bite; and I plan to sprinkle those sorts of wacky, barely coherent bits of prose into as many of my articles as I can, so you know that what you are reading was written by a real
well-adjustedhuman, and not some fancy probability output machine - Sleep: turns out it was overrated after all (NOTE: I am not a doctor; this article does not constitute medical advice)
Why I'm Coming Back
I have a lot I want to say.
And it's about AI.
Because my entire workflow changed on February 5, 2026.
That's when Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6
It wrote code at the same level as an experienced developer.
And I knew in that moment that my days of handwriting code were over.
But I don't vibe code.
I architect software solutions.
While the AI writes the code.
Join me on this journey.
Where we will combine speed and safety.
Get ready to move fast and brace things.
