Adam Dawkins

It's becoming common in development circles to refer to AI agents as genies.

I like this word, because it speaks to something of the wishful nature of using an agent. I might get what I want, I might not. Ironically, by using such a magical word, we strip away some of the 'magic' around how AI agents work. You ask for something; they give you something.

The idea of genies comes from the jinn of Arabia. The jinn have free will, they can be good, neutral, or evil. They live in a parallel world to humans. Stop me when this stops sounding familiar.

Some days when coding, I think my genie is a genius. Some days, I find it a productive tool that has saved me hours of work and brain power; and I can pass all of these benefits on to my clients.

Some days aren't like this. Some days I wish there were no genies, and that I could go back to writing the code myself. I know how to do it. I'm good at it.

When the genies frustrate me, I think about the horses of New York City.

By 1870 New Yorkers were taking over 100 million trips a year by horse-drawn streetcar. On July 26th, 1917, the last horse-drawn streetcar ceased operations. The era of the automobile had arrived.

If horse-drawn streetcars are the world of software development before AI, I'm an expert horseman.

I know the streets of the applications I build inside and out, and I know how to drive the horses. But I also know I can't afford to be the 1890 cab driver insisting that the automobile will never catch on.

And this brings us back to the genies.

The genie is out of the bottle.

I would rather we had not opened it. But we did. So I am learning, still, to refine my wishes.

Em dashes have been a staple of quality writing for centuries. Writers like Dickens, Hemingway, and publications like The New Yorker have used them extensively. In fact, distinctive punctuation choices often reflect a writer's personal style. When editing, I like to take a moment on each piece of punctuation and choose the one that works better—or sometimes—just looks better.

Often, I reach for the em dash.

It creates dramatic pauses—making readers hang on your next words. It sets off explanatory asides—like this one—without the formality of parentheses. It signals interruptions in dialogue, connects related thoughts, and emphasises important points.

The em dash is the punctuation of passion—the mark of a writer who cannot be contstrained. Virginia Woolf loved them. Emily Dickinson scattered them liberally through her poetry. The New Yorker has made them part of its distinctive voice.

In hand-writing, it's even more emphatic! Just a line as long as you want—keep reading this!

When used thoughtfully, em dashes create rhythm and flow. They give prose a conversational quality—a human voice—that feels intimate and direct. They create emphasis without shouting, separation without disconnection.

I'm not the only one here. Ben Zimmer wrote in the New York Times in 2011

I've tried to tone down my dashiness. But I still admire the artfully wielded em-dash, especially used near the end of a sentence—when it works, it really works.

In a world of careful grammar and standardised style guides, the em dash stands as a reminder that writing is still an art—personal, expressive, and delightfully flexible.

It's probably true that in the age of LLM content generation that we're going to see a lot of similar prose again and again. And the mark of authenticity is going to be something we all look for. But, don't mistake the return to formal prose, or the usage of every available method of punctuation as a sign that you know I generated this with AI.

I didn't — but I've squeezed as many em dashes in as possible.