Lately I’ve realised how much I use and depend on AI tools for basic daily tasks. Not so long ago, I could read articles, study material or novels for hours on end and not lose focus, I could sit down, manually scribble my ideas with pen and paper and write creative content without second guessing every single word I was writing. I feel like the hobbies I enjoyed so much had become a task that needed to be perfected, polished, and needed an AI agent’s approval at every step.

It’s ironic to think, we hit approve every time an AI agent is getting a task done for us, whereas in reality, we have stopped doing anything without its approval or suggestions. We’ve stopped trusting that our brain can learn, store and retrieve massive amounts of information and knowledge. We’ve stopped believing that we can navigate simple mundane scenarios or solve problems without AI.

“What you don’t use, you lose”, a phrase that’s been haunting me lately. How often have you caught yourself coming up with a brilliant idea but you immediately had to run it past an LLM to build the idea further or to see if it made sense, that abrupt stop after we get an amazing idea is preventing us from learning, creating and evolving further. I’ve been there too and found myself losing my flair and ability to think creatively. I wanted to change that.

I’m an architect turned data scientist but I’m also a creative individual who loves a good challenge. I absolutely love writing, programming and building things, so for starters I built myself a Python script that generates writing prompts for my 30-day writing challenge.

Here’s how it works:

1. A list of 60 topics I’m learning as a data scientist, each tagged with a subject and a type (explain, build, compare, debug)

2. A list of writing rules: two that every post follows, plus two more picked at random to suit the topic’s type

3. Each run picks a topic I haven’t used yet and keeps a record so nothing repeats.

4. Then a simple “show_prompt” function displays the final prompt like in the following example.

Example prompt generated by the author

Here are some things I found challenging while building the script:

1. How can I add variety to each consecutive prompt? Randomizing the topic and constraints meant that I had to randomly choose a topic, choose 2 constraints associated with the type of the topic selected (for example: if type was ‘Explain’, I would also need constraints associated with that type and not random constraints for the prompt to make sense). Then I had to combine the default constraints and current prompt constraints into one list and combine it with the selected topic.
2. Was there a way to see a prompt but not use it up? Because each run uses up a prompt and saves its id in used, I had to use Python’s argparse module, which lets me add options like --peek that allows me to only “peek” at a prompt.
3. What happens when all 60 prompts are used up? Is there a way to reset the generator? For this, I added an argparse option --reset, that allows me to reset the prompt generator to make all 60 prompts available again.

This was Day 0 of posting about a tool I built to help myself reach my true potential. I’ll be posting 1 post every day for the next 30 days based on a prompt I get, strictly adhering to the constraints, no skipping it if it’s challenging and no AI to help me write or code.

In my own way, this is a little revolt against the complacency we’ve willingly embraced in exchange for technological convenience.

Would you join this revolt?