This page is to clarify that all articles, coaching documentation, and resources on useful.coach are hand-written by me (Tom Herbert), in my own words, and not 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.
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. I also want to point out that I was using the em dash long before modern agents learnt to use them. Interestingly, I now go out of my way to avoid them, as it is often seen as a sign of AI content generation. Annoying but true.
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.
This website is built with 11ty using my own CSS (not Tailwind) guided by Utopia. It has a TypeScript authentication routing, and Stripe billing backend using ExpressJS, Neon, Resend, and hosted on Netlify. The backend development code is co-authored with AI, specifically using Opencode, Claude Code and Z.ai/GLM.
No articles, coaching documentation, or resources are written by AI, and they never will be.
I specifically use 11ty, because it means I can stay in GNU Emacs, and just write my content by hand in Markdown and Nunjucks. Whatever you are reading has been typed out by me personally on my UK Filco Ninja Majestouch-2, MX Brown Tactile, Keyboard at home, or on my Lenovo Thinkpad X390.
AI is phenomenal. I use it every single day, mostly for backend code or admin tasks.
However, it will not write my content.