TL;DR: Yes!

Today, I posted a tweet complaining that I haven’t written a blog post in a long time. Then, I received a very interesting comment: “It’s hard to say in the AI era what use writing a blog still has—my depth of thinking falls far short of AI’s.”

Suddenly, I realized that, as a (somewhat lazy) blogger, I’ve always approached blogging from a writer’s perspective. But when I’m a reader, or more precisely, a learner, I do read fewer blog posts than I did before the era of GenAI, especially when I’m trying to learn something immediately.

It is true that GenAI has reshaped how we search and learn. I cannot imagine my life without GenAI nowadays. Whether I’m coding or doing daily staffs, once I have a question, I usually ask an AI fist, instead of doing what I used to do: searching through massive amounts of web pages, piecing together scattered information, filtering it, and learn it.

It’s not just me. Most developers work this way now. As the news from a few weeks ago says: StackOverflow’s newly asked questions has dropped to its lowest level in 20 years.

This makes me sad. I used to be a loyal StackOverflow fan. I even bought the StackOverflow × Drop co-branded keyboard, The Key v2, from overseas for support. Sadly, that is the fact.

So does reading and writing blogs really have no use anymore? Of course not, at least not for me. Compared with the period before GenAI, I now read more medium and long blog posts.

In the past, blogs, especially tech blogs, not only told the full story, but also offered bite-sized knowledge for people who needed something they could use right away. With GenAI, I can focus more on the full knowledge flow in a blog post. When I hit something I don’t understand, I can use GenAI to fill in the gaps quickly. This actually speeds up how I can understand more obscure technical blog posts.

On the other hand, being a blog writer is still valuable in the GenAI era.

First, GenAI still often hallucinates on specialized topics. Blogs are one of the best ways to correct those mistakes. When writing a blog, we can record knowledge we’ve verified, so we can fix the “unreliable” answers we get from GenAI.

Second, through blogging, we can organize our thoughts into a clear, coherent thread. When learning with GenAI, we often need to piece together the full picture through a series of Q&As, rather than getting a complete answer in one shot. During this process, we frequently branch out in different directions and backtrack. Writing a blog helps us capture this as a continuous line of thinking. Most of the time, that matters more than the final result.

Thrid, sharing makes me happy. With or without GenAI, I’ve never stopped sharing for fun. I like sharing memes and other blog posts to my friends and my followers. More excitingly, now I can even share my conversations with AI directly. I think being able to share what you like and gain happyness from is a human privilege that GenAI doesn’t have. The content may have changed, but human never stopped sharing.

Overall, even in the GenAI era, I’m still confident about reading and writing blogs. To me, blogging is about earning attention in an endless sea of knowledge. Whether you take notes from books with pen and paper, or use an iPad and Apple Pencil to write notes on a digital device, or blogging what you think important extracted from the conversation with GenAI,the need for note-taking has never disappeared; only the form and purpose have changed.