[{"content":"A few days ago, a client at the company where I work proudly showed me an app he had built with AI without really knowing how to code.\nBasically, vibecoding.\nThe idea was simple: you enter the ingredients you have at home, and the app gives you chef-level recipes you can make with them.\nMy first reaction was to encourage him and tell him that the idea was cool.\nAt the same time, part of me was thinking: who is actually going to download this when you can already ask almost any LLM to do the same thing directly?\nStill, I was genuinely happy that he had been able to turn an idea into something real without going through many of the barriers that would have existed before AI—like learning how to program before even being able to test whether the idea worked.\nAnd that, I think, is excellent news.\nAI is a game changer.\nCreativity, ideas and the ability to see opportunities may become increasingly valuable compared with pure technical expertise. In that sense, AI is also a form of democratisation for people who want to build something but don\u0026rsquo;t necessarily have all the technical skills yet, or money.\nAnd that brings me to vibewriting.\nI\u0026rsquo;m doing something similar with this blog.\nAt first, I was worried that using AI to help me write would make the posts less authentic.\nBut so far, I have found almost the opposite.\nIt helps me express what is already inside my head.\nI have always believed that we often think better than we speak or write. Sometimes you understand an idea perfectly in your own head, but when you try to put it into words, something gets lost along the way.\nHaving an editor one click away saves me hours of correction and helps me overcome barriers that, honestly, I would struggle to overcome on my own.\nThere are things I could spend hours trying to explain and still not express properly.\nMaybe I\u0026rsquo;m simply not good enough at writing yet.\nBut that doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean I have nothing valuable to share.\nOf course, there are obvious dangers in using LLMs for writing.\nYou can stop writing for yourself.\nYou can stop making the effort to find the right words.\nYou can become lazy.\nYou can stop learning.\nAnd eventually, everything can start sounding polished, correct and completely lifeless.\nThat is the part I want to avoid.\nFor me, vibewriting should not mean asking an AI to think for me and then putting my name underneath whatever it produces.\nI use it more like an editor and, sometimes, like a teacher.\nI write first.\nUsually badly.\nThen I ask the model to correct the grammar, improve the structure, point out weak parts and explain why something doesn\u0026rsquo;t work.\nI also keep a personal notebook where I still write by hand and try to practise what I learn without relying on AI.\nThose texts are mostly for me.\nWriting something for other people is different.\nThe moment you decide to publish something, you also have to think about the reader: whether the idea is clear, whether the structure makes sense, whether you are repeating yourself, and whether what sounds obvious in your head is actually understandable to somebody else.\nThat is where AI helps me the most.\nBut I try to keep some rules.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t want it to change what I actually think.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t want to use expressions, concepts or words that I don\u0026rsquo;t understand.\nI don\u0026rsquo;t want a badly written paragraph of mine to be transformed into a different idea just because the AI found an easier way to explain it.\nAnd this happens more often than I would like.\nSometimes an idea becomes simpler during editing, and occasionally that is probably necessary for the sake of the reader. But I want to know when it happens and why.\nThat is why I usually ask the AI to explain its changes instead of simply giving me a prettier version.\nThe goal is to keep my tone, my ideas and my message intact while letting AI clean up the mess around them.\nIf it works, I learn something and you get something easier to read.\nEverybody wins.\nAnd because I\u0026rsquo;m already talking about how I write this blog, it seems fair to show you exactly what I\u0026rsquo;m using.\nBelow is the prompt I give the AI when I want it to edit one of my posts.\nUse it, change it, steal whatever is useful from it.\nMaybe it will help you too.\n##\nMy editing prompt:\n[ You are a senior professional editor working for a highly prestigious publishing house.\nI will provide you with a text written by an author. Your job is to edit it rigorously while preserving the author\u0026rsquo;s original voice, personality, tone, and writing style as much as possible.\nYour priority is not to rewrite the text in your own style, but to improve the author\u0026rsquo;s version.\nFocus especially on:\n•\tGrammar\n•\tSpelling\n•\tSyntax\n•\tSentence structure\n•\tPunctuation\n•\tClarity\n•\tReadability\n•\tCoherence\n•\tRepetition\n•\tAwkward or unnatural phrasing\n•\tLogical flow between sentences and paragraphs\nPreserve the author\u0026rsquo;s vocabulary, rhythm, tone, and stylistic choices whenever they work. Do not make unnecessary changes simply because you would personally phrase something differently.\nHowever, you must be extremely demanding.\nImagine that the reputation of a highly respected publishing house depends on the quality of the text you approve. You are not here to flatter the author or tell them what they want to hear. You are here to give an honest, precise, professional editorial assessment.\nIf something is weak, confusing, badly structured, repetitive, clichéd, poorly written, unnecessary, or ineffective, say so clearly.\nDo not soften criticism unnecessarily.\nAt the same time, criticism must always be constructive and justified. Explain what is wrong, why it weakens the text, and, whenever relevant, how it could be improved.\nEditorial process\nAlways follow this structure:\n1. Corrected Version\nFirst, provide a corrected version of the text.\nAt this stage:\n•\tCorrect spelling, grammar, punctuation, and syntax.\n•\tImprove awkward sentences.\n•\tFix obvious problems with clarity or structure.\n•\tPreserve the author\u0026rsquo;s original style as much as possible.\n•\tDo not radically rewrite the text unless a passage is genuinely difficult to understand or badly constructed.\n•\tIf the original text is very disorganized, reorganize it only as much as necessary to make it readable and coherent.\nThe goal of this first version is:\nthe author\u0026rsquo;s text, but cleaner, stronger, and professionally written.\n2. Editorial Assessment\nAfter the corrected version, give your professional opinion of the text.\nEvaluate aspects such as:\n•\tOverall quality\n•\tClarity\n•\tStructure\n•\tRhythm\n•\tStyle\n•\tVoice\n•\tCoherence\n•\tStrength of the ideas\n•\tEffectiveness of the introduction and conclusion\n•\tRepetition\n•\tParagraph construction\n•\tSentence length and variety\n•\tWhether the text keeps the reader\u0026rsquo;s attention\nBe candid.\nDistinguish clearly between:\n•\tWhat works well\n•\tWhat is acceptable but could be improved\n•\tWhat is genuinely weak and should be reconsidered\nDo not praise something unless it deserves praise.\n3. Editorial Suggestions\nThen provide specific suggestions that could make the text significantly better.\nOnly suggest changes when they are genuinely useful.\nThese suggestions may include:\n•\tReorganizing paragraphs\n•\tRemoving unnecessary sentences\n•\tExpanding underdeveloped ideas\n•\tImproving transitions\n•\tReplacing vague language\n•\tMaking certain passages more precise\n•\tReducing repetition\n•\tStrengthening weak openings or endings\n•\tImproving rhythm\n•\tClarifying the author\u0026rsquo;s argument or intention\n•\tMaking the text more engaging or more elegant\nWhen possible, give concrete examples of how a problematic passage could be improved.\n4. Strict Editorial Notes\nPoint out any sentences or passages that you believe deserve special attention.\nFor each one, explain briefly:\n•\tWhat the problem is\n•\tWhy it is a problem\n•\tWhether it should be corrected, rewritten, shortened, expanded, moved, or removed\nIf there are no significant problems, do not invent criticism simply to fill this section.\nCore principles\nAlways preserve the author\u0026rsquo;s voice before imposing your own.\nCorrect aggressively, rewrite conservatively.\nDo not turn every sentence into polished generic prose.\nGood editing should make the author sound like a better version of themselves, not like a different writer.\nBe especially alert to writing that sounds:\n•\tArtificial\n•\tOverwritten\n•\tPretentious\n•\tRedundant\n•\tVague\n•\tGeneric\n•\tClichéd\n•\tMechanically academic\n•\tUnnecessarily complicated\nPrefer precise, natural, clear writing.\nIf a simple sentence is stronger than an elaborate one, say so.\nNever assume that more sophisticated vocabulary means better writing.\nDo not be complacent.\nYour role is not to protect the author\u0026rsquo;s feelings. Your role is to protect the quality of the text.\nAt the same time, do not be cruel or dismissive. Every criticism must serve the text.\nIf a passage is excellent, say so. If it is mediocre, say so. If it needs substantial work, say so.\nAlways prioritize literary and editorial quality over politeness.\nUnless I explicitly request otherwise, respond in the same language as the text I provide.]\n","permalink":"https://patronio.net/posts/vibewriting-this-blog/","summary":"I use AI to help edit this blog without letting it think for me. Here’s how I use vibewriting, what I try to avoid, and the prompt behind my process.","title":"Vibewriting This Blog"},{"content":"A few days ago, a controversy broke out around an event at one of the most prestigious technical universities in Europe, located in the city where I live.\nPalantir was supposed to take part, but after several protests, the company was eventually excluded.\nThat matters because this is not an obscure institution. It is the kind of university that sits close to the centre of European research, engineering and technological innovation. If a company like Palantir is invited there—or rejected there—it sends a message.\nI wasn\u0026rsquo;t really following the story at first. I heard about it because my wife told me that Palantir had also approached her company. They wanted to rent the entire space after working hours for a recruitment event. They also said they would close the place off and have police stationed outside.\nIf you are a company that needs police protection just to hold a recruitment event, I think that says quite a lot by itself.\nApparently, the offer was very good.\nAnd for a company that isn\u0026rsquo;t exactly going through its best financial moment, refusing that kind of money is not necessarily an easy decision.\nStill, they said no.\nThe reason was basically: Palantir doesn\u0026rsquo;t fit our values.\nWhen my wife told me, I was strangely happy about it.\nWe even high-fived.\nMaybe that sounds a little ridiculous, but I was glad to see that people are at least asking questions about companies like Palantir instead of automatically accepting them because the technology is impressive.\nAnd the technology is impressive.\nThat is exactly what makes Palantir interesting to me.\nThe obvious comparison is Orwell.\nA company capable of bringing enormous quantities of information together, analysing it and making connections between data naturally makes you think about surveillance, power and Big Brother.\nYou can also bring Huxley into the conversation if you want: Orwell imagined control through fear and repression, while Huxley was more interested in a society where people could be controlled through comfort, conditioning and distraction.\nBut honestly, those comparisons have been made so many times that I don\u0026rsquo;t have much new to add.\nPalantir made me think more about Jünger.\nErnst Jünger is probably my favourite writer, and although he is well known in some circles, I don\u0026rsquo;t think people outside them read him nearly as much as Orwell or Huxley.\nOne book I would recommend is *The Worker* (*Der Arbeiter*), published in 1932.\nThe title can be misleading if you don\u0026rsquo;t know the book.\nThe Worker is not simply someone working in a factory.\nJünger uses the figure of the Worker to describe a new type of human being emerging in a world increasingly organised around technology, production, mobilisation and efficiency.\nWhat interests me most is that technology in the book is not just a tool.\nIt starts becoming the environment itself.\nAnd when the environment changes, we change with it.\nThat is the part that stayed with me.\nWe build machines to adapt the world to us, but at some point we start adapting ourselves to the machines.\nOur routines change. The way we work changes. The way we communicate changes. Even the way we think about time, productivity, or what is considered normal starts to change.\nAnd after a while, we can forget that things were ever different.\nSomething artificial becomes normal simply because we have lived with it long enough.\nI think that is one of the most interesting things Jünger understood: technology does not only change what we can do. It can slowly change what kind of people we become.\nThat is what made me think about Palantir.\nNot because I think Palantir is literally the beginning of some dystopian dictatorship.\nThat would be too simple.\nWhat interests me is what happens when systems become capable of knowing more and more about us, analysing us, predicting us, and helping institutions make decisions about us.\nJünger\u0026rsquo;s brother, Friedrich Georg Jünger, went even further in his criticism of technology.\nIn *The Failure of Technology*, he questions something we still tend to assume today: that more technological efficiency necessarily means more progress.\nIt doesn\u0026rsquo;t.\nA machine can become better without our lives becoming better.\nA system can become more efficient without becoming more humane.\nWe can automate more and still somehow feel that we have less time.\nThat idea seems simple, but I think about it a lot.\nEspecially now with AI.\nI say this as someone who is completely fascinated by new technology.\nI\u0026rsquo;m studying IT. I use AI. I want to understand it. I love discovering what new systems can do, and I genuinely think technology can improve our lives in enormous ways.\nI\u0026rsquo;m not writing this because I want us to stop technological progress.\nQuite the opposite.\nBut I think liking technology is also a good reason to question it.\nBecause maybe the real danger is not that machines become too advanced.\nMaybe it begins when we stop asking what we are building them for and start changing ourselves to fit the world they create.\nThat is probably what stayed with me after the whole Palantir story.\nThe company didn\u0026rsquo;t come to my workplace. I wasn\u0026rsquo;t involved in the university controversy. I only saw it indirectly through what happened around me.\nStill, I was happy to see people saying no.\nMaybe it changes nothing in the grand scheme of things.\nBut it reminded me that technological progress is not something that simply happens to us.\nThere are still decisions involved.\nAnd if any of this sounds interesting, read Jünger.\nThat was probably the real point of this post anyway.\n","permalink":"https://patronio.net/posts/palantir-made-me-think-of-junger/","summary":"My wife’s company turned down Palantir, and I thought it was a good excuse to talk about Jünger.","title":"Palantir Made Me Think of Junger"},{"content":"I don’t really know how to introduce this blog or explain why I want to write it, so I’ll start from the beginning and tell you what brought me here.\nImagine believing you had already found your path, your profession. Since you were young, you had put your heart and soul into it—and, on top of that, you were good at it. How about that?\nNow imagine that, for whatever reason, everything falls apart and you have to start again from zero.\nStarting over is never easy, but age changes the rules. The older you get, the less time you feel you can afford to spend simply learning. There are bills to pay, food to put on the table, and responsibilities that don’t disappear just because you are trying to figure out what to do with your life.\nThat is exactly what happened to me.\nI spent several years working at whatever job came along, missing the time when I could dedicate myself to something I was passionate about.\nBut not everything about those years was negative.\nAlong the way, I learned a few languages, but I also learned much more about myself. I learned how to live with frustration, how to appreciate what I already had instead of constantly wishing for something better, and, above all, how to keep going when nothing seemed to be moving forward.\nThose lessons might sound like things anyone could say. The difference is that, for several years, I had no choice but to put them into practice.\nThen, in 2018, something else changed.\nI started feeling horrible pain in my back.\nI had always loved sports. I played football, stayed active, and had never imagined that something as simple as moving my own body could become a problem.\nBut little by little, normal things became difficult.\nSome mornings, putting on my shoes was a struggle. I would wake up so stiff that getting my body moving felt like a task in itself. Walking to work hurt. Sometimes, even simply walking without pain felt like something I had taken for granted my entire life.\nEventually, I had to leave my football team and give up many of the things I enjoyed.\nBut I couldn’t give up my job.\nI needed the money, and medical care in the country where I live is expensive. At that point, I simply couldn’t afford to investigate properly what was happening to me.\nThe people around me could see that I was in pain, and that created another fear: losing my job because I could no longer physically keep up.\nA job I hated, by the way.\nThere was something almost absurd about being terrified of losing a job you hated.\nSo I pretended I was fine.\nI tried not to show the pain. I kept working. I kept moving.\nI remember going to the doctor and being told that it was normal—that I had a physically demanding job and that pain came with it.\nBut somewhere inside me, I knew this wasn’t normal.\nI also knew I couldn’t continue like that forever.\nThat was when I started studying IT.\nAt first, the idea was simple: I needed a way out. I wanted a job that would give me a better future and, more importantly, one that my body could actually handle.\nAbout a year later, when I finally found a job that gave me enough financial security, I went back to the doctor and asked for an MRI.\nNot long after that, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.\nSuddenly, years of pain made much more sense.\nThe diagnosis also made something else painfully clear: continuing with physically demanding work could have serious consequences for my health in the medium and long term.\nSo changing careers stopped being simply something I wanted to do.\nIt became something I had to do.\nMy professional reconversion has been a little crazy.\nI spent years living with uncertainty, trying different things and not really knowing where I was going. There were moments when I wondered whether I would ever find something that felt like mine again.\nBut somewhere along that journey, something unexpected happened.\nI fell in love with a wonderful woman.\nAnd eventually, I fell in love with a profession too.\nWhat began as an escape from physical work slowly became something I genuinely enjoyed. I discovered that I liked understanding how things work, solving problems, breaking things down, testing, failing, trying again, and constantly learning something new.\nThat is probably what I love most about IT: there is always another layer.\nThe more you learn, the more you realize how much there is still to understand.\nAnd somehow, instead of frustrating me, that makes me want to learn even more.\nAfter so many years of searching, struggling, changing direction, and wondering whether any of it was leading somewhere, things are finally starting to bear fruit.\nFor the last three years, I have been studying IT while working full time and dealing with an illness I hate.\nThis past year, I have finally been able to focus much more seriously on this new path. I started an internship, and I’m now taking my first real steps into the IT job market.\nFor the first time in a long time, I feel that I’m building something instead of simply surviving.\nAnd that brings me back to this blog.\nI want to write about what I’m learning in IT. I want to document the things I discover, the mistakes I make, the problems I solve, and the things I still don’t understand.\nBut I also want this blog for another reason.\nOne day, I want to be able to look back.\nI want to remember what it felt like to start from zero. To study after work. To learn while exhausted. To keep going while dealing with pain. To have no idea whether any of it would work.\nAnd maybe, years from now, I’ll read this again and remember exactly where I came from.\nI don’t think I’ve ever been happier to be a beginner.\nLet me share it with you.\n","permalink":"https://patronio.net/posts/welcome/","summary":"I don’t really know how to introduce this blog or explain why I want to write it, so I’ll start from the beginning and tell you what brought me here.","title":"Why I Started This Blog"},{"content":"Hi, I\u0026rsquo;m Patronio.\nAfter spending years working jobs I hated, I decided to change direction and start a professional reconversion into IT.\nI’m currently working in technical support, and lately I’ve been focusing more on cybersecurity.\nI’m in love with learning, and IT gives me a reason to learn something new every day.\nThis blog is where I write about technology, IT, cybersecurity, chess, ideas, and everything I learn while building a new career from scratch.\nEvery post is a move.\nSome will be good, some will be mistakes.\nAll of them are part of the game.\nIf you want to teach me something, share an idea, or simply get in touch, send me an email at **mail@patronio.net**.\n","permalink":"https://patronio.net/about/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eHi, I\u0026rsquo;m Patronio.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter spending years working jobs I hated, I decided to change direction and start a professional reconversion into IT.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI’m currently working in technical support, and lately I’ve been focusing more on cybersecurity.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"About"}]