This page is to clarify that articles, coaching documentation, and resources on useful.coach are hand-written by me (Tom Herbert), in my own words, and not wholesale generated by an AI agent.
I believe it is important to state this, because I want you to understand that I take pride in the process and effort of writing, choosing my own words, and using my own voice to communicate ideas and information. Though AI is used for research, grammar, and suggestions, the final copy is decided and written in my own words. Hence some articles have taken over a month to complete.
I have been on the internet (“World Wide Web”) since 1994, and have seen the incredible evolution, and unfortunate devolution into AI generated slop—content for content’s sake. Oh and I was using em dashes long before modern AI agents learnt to. Ironically, I now avoid them, as they’ve become a sign of AI-generated content.
Before coaching, I spent over 15 years in the web hosting industry with my last role being a Linux System engineer. I have been using Linux (Debian since 2003, Arch since 2017), and am currently writing this markdown page in GNU Emacs. If you are interested, I run StumpWM on top of XFCE. I am still partly in the tech space, working two days a week alongside my coaching as a DevOps engineer for a dance coaching and community platform: lab.dance.
This website is built with 11ty using my own CSS (not Tailwind) inspired by Utopia. It has a TypeScript authentication routing, and Stripe billing backend using Hono, Neon, Resend, and hosted on Netlify. The backend development code is co-authored with AI, specifically using Opencode, Claude Code. I use a NASA-inspired defensive programming framework to guide agents: explicit error handling, runtime invariants, timeouts on all external calls, and structured logging. Some article hero images are created using Claude and Midjourney.
I specifically use 11ty because it means I can stay in GNU Emacs and write my content in Markdown and Nunjucks. Whatever you are reading has been typed out by me personally on my UK Filco Ninja Majestouch-2 or Lenovo Thinkpad X390.
AI is phenomenal, but it will not wholesale write my content.