Why I'm Starting Seb's Sandbox
Introduction
Hello there, and welcome to Seb’s Sandbox, creatively named because alliteration is always awesome. However you found your way here, I thought I should start with a short introduction: who I am, what I want this blog to be, and what you might get from reading it.
Who am I
My name is Sebastian. I am originally from Germany, but I have spent most of my working years abroad and do not plan on going back any time soon. For the past few years I have been living in Japan, which I greatly enjoy and recommend everyone visit at least once. I won’t claim to have had an interest in AI all my life. In fact, it’s a very recently acquired interest, dating back pretty much to when ChatGPT came out in late 2022. It started mostly through my work as a data engineer, where I began using AI tools for code generation and review. I also found them great as learning companions. Only recently did I start researching and experimenting with AI tools more deliberately. And that is exactly why I decided to start this blog.
What is this blog
So, another blog about AI (who doesn’t want to jump onto the current hype train) and data (maybe not as glamorous as AI). What makes this blog different from others? Well, I don’t have a clear answer to that yet! For now, the goal is simple: write in public while I learn, and turn that learning into something useful for others.
I have been working with AI tools for some time now, as many of you probably have too, assuming you found your way here because you are at least somewhat interested in AI. And with executive teams pushing AI hard since 2023, chasing the promised land of “productivity gains” and “efficiency increases”, it has truly become impossible to ignore.
For me, the biggest shift came when I started using AI coding agents, especially Claude Code. No more copy-pasting stuff into ChatGPT. No more treating AI as just autocomplete inside my editor. Suddenly I have a tool that I can give access to ALL of my files. I don’t need to explain the same things over and over in every new session. And every week there are new features, new workflows and new habits that make these tools more useful. It feels like if I don’t keep up with feature announcements, guides, and people discovering better ways to use them, I’ll fall behind. It is hard to keep up. The FOMO is real.
In this blog I want to document my journey. This is mostly for my own learning. But publishing online feels different from scribbling some notes into Notion or collecting bullet points in a .doc file. Knowing that I will publish it online makes me feel more accountable for the content. At least, it does if I care about not being the guy who confidently spouts poorly researched half-truths. Of course, I might still be wrong. But publishing makes me feel more responsible for researching properly and producing something useful. It will also push me to try new things, whether that means new features in existing tools or new tools altogether. But I will do it at my own pace. That means that I don’t need to be at the forefront of it all, lurking on X or other websites chasing every new announcement. I might cover a new feature if it sounds useful for my projects or revisit an older tool, feature or workflow that I simply have not had time (or courage) to explore properly.
What can you gain from reading this
I imagine some of you are in a similar position. We use AI at work, and maybe in personal projects too, but we still have this feeling of “I can probably do more with this”, or “I wonder how this actually works”, or “how can I make this better?”. I want each post to focus on a specific topic so it is easier to digest. That topic might be a specific tool, a concept, or even just a single feature within a tool. Hopefully, you can learn a thing or two from some of my posts here or at least feel motivated to dig a little deeper yourself. I would love to hear what you built, how you applied something you read here, or where you think I got something wrong. Maybe there is a much better or easier way to do something, and I would like to learn from that too. In the end, I want to understand this technology well enough to use it deliberately instead of just reacting to every new tool. That is what I want this blog to be about: learning in public, testing ideas, and turning the useful parts into something others can try too.