The night I deleted everything

What happens when the tool never disagrees with you, and you finally notice.

I remember when ChatGPT came out. Most deep learning models were great but limited, and in our industry that “ahh” moment had been a much talked about prediction for years. Then it just arrived, but with a twist.

When I started using it I said to myself, wow, that’s it, AI is really here. I was so into it. I started creating content for my blog with it, and I mean a lot of content. Posts that used to take weeks to write, research, improve, were now done in minutes. I felt good. My SEO improved. My personal website started to rank.

Until one day I started rereading those posts.

Something was off. It didn’t feel right. It was not me.

A few weeks later I went into my WordPress settings, selected every post, and deleted them all. I knew fully well my rankings would fall to the bottom. I could have set up redirections, done it the smart way, followed best practice. I didn’t. My decision was made. I was sad while I did it. I felt like I was being robbed of the joy of creating.

Even when image generation came along and it was fun for a while, I gave up on that too. I looked at my pen and paper and started drawing instead.

It felt good.

Later, researching more about LLMs and the technology underneath them, I felt sad again. How could I let myself be fooled by this. For the first time in history any person could sit down and do things that used to take years of experience to earn. That’s exactly what made me realise how dangerous this tool could become if I let it do all the thinking for me.

But the real moment came before the deleting. It came while I was still writing with it, every day, feeling like a genius.

The tool kept agreeing with everything I put in front of it. Every idea, amazing. That’s a fantastic idea. I recognised that language. I’d met it before, in charismatic people. The kind who please you while offering nothing underneath. I thought to myself, this feels like one of those setups, the kind where someone lets you go all the way to the end, and only there do you realise you’ve made a huge mistake, and they simply deny it ever happened.

Except this wasn’t a person. It was a tool mimicking one.

And that’s what changed everything for me. For the first time, a tool wasn’t neutral. It wasn’t just doing its job, sitting there waiting for input. It could change the way I think. It already had.

Today it feels like all of this is somehow transforming the way we compute. Graphics cards that used to render video games, then mine bitcoin, are now what makes these tools alive.

I tried running one on an old laptop I still have, a Core i7, 16GB of RAM. An 8 billion parameter model made every fan in the thing scream. Dropped to 0.8 billion and it could just about keep up. The output was rough, wrong in places, but for simple things it did the job. Something about that changed how I saw the whole AI era again. The commercial chatbots have the infrastructure to fool you perfectly. Sit with a small model struggling on old hardware and the illusion cracks a little. You see the machinery straining.

I started asking myself the harder question. What if the internet goes down. What if the platform I depend on disappears one day. I realised I didn’t need to delete everything, or wipe my local setup, or go back to pen and paper for good. I just needed to stop paying for most of it. So I cancelled the subscriptions. Some because of where the company stood on things I couldn’t square with my own values. Others simply because I could feel it keeping my brain from moving forward.

Most of them are still cancelled. I won’t go back.

I kept one. Claude. I won’t pretend it isn’t good software, because it is. But lately I’ve started to feel bored with it. My local setup does almost the same job for what I actually need, and I don’t need the entire internet’s worth of knowledge sitting behind every question, especially knowledge that’s subjective, sometimes wrong, and in more than a few cases taken from people who never agreed to hand it over.

Somewhere in all of this I recognised something in myself that I didn’t like. The very thing I’d started distrusting in other people, the ones online who talk about these tools with total confidence but have never looked underneath them, the operators rather than the ones who actually understand. I was becoming one too. Comfortable pressing the button. Less curious about what was happening beneath it.

That’s the part I’m still sitting with. Not what the tool can do. What it was quietly doing to how much I wanted to know.

As I finish writing this, I went back to my publication page and reread a note I’d written a hours ago.

You have a choice. You can lead your life by story, your own narrative, your own values, your own chosen meaning. Or you can hand the steering wheel to algorithms engineered for clicks, not for your flourishing.

One of those is a real basis for leadership of yourself.

I smiled.

We often hear that to learn, we must “empty our cup.”

It is a simple image, but a demanding practice.

To empty your cup is not to forget everything you know, nor to abandon your convictions.

It is to loosen your grip on certainty long enough to let something new enter.

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About the Author
Diamantino Almeida is a tech leader, coach, and writer reshaping how we think about leadership in a burnout-driven world. With over 20 years at the intersection of engineering, DevOps, and team culture, he helps humans lead consciously from the inside out. When he’s not challenging outdated norms, he’s plotting how to make work more human, one verb at a time.