This weekend, I spent my days working on a project that took me back to my childhood. In a good way, not in a bad way.
Using generative AI daily has taught me that ideas I had as a child could now become reality as an adult. I struggled to learn how to program in BASIC; I attempted to learn it as a programming language at least two, possibly three times growing up. Today, the story is quite different.
Now, I have access to tools that allow me to describe the problem that I would like to solve. I express my requirements, the outcome, and my definition of a successful outcome. As well, I define the guardrails, the “must haves”, and the rule around how the work will be done.
https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavors
For me, this is one of the greatest times to be alive!
The benefit I get from doing projects like orchestrating and directing software building is a deeper sense of the “human challenges” software developers face daily. The struggle is real, and it is frustrating.
From lost hours having to undo module updates to reworking a process because an agent and model combination changed in an integrated development environment, all these things cause stress. Having recently experienced both examples, I write this point with understanding and empathy.
All of this does not change these three things:
People solving problems for people
People doing business with people
People building with AI for people
I choose to anchor my work in the points above. I’m not an AI absolutist. Nor am I an AI evangelist. I am an AI realist, pragmatist, and practitioner who understands how it may improve our life quality when used well. Alternatively, I understand how AI might negatively impact our lives when used in nefarious ways.
More than most things, I want AI to be a tool that frees people from undue drudgery.
As a result, I spend my weekends working on AI projects. Figuring out how to make things work. Wiring and rewiring tools that enable me to build useful things. It genuinely makes me happy when I solve a problem and have a working system for my effort.
Not everything works the first time out. In fact, I wrestled with a problem for two or three evenings this past week. It didn’t get solved, and I refused to be a victim of sunk cost falicy as a result. The problem has little impact on my ability to get my other projects finished. Yes, it is annoying that it continues to exist, and no, I am not going to let the annoyance stop me from moving forward.
We are at the beginning of what I consider the “AI Age” which evolved out of the “Information Age”. The type and quality of AI tools we have today will pale in comparison to the tools we invent 10 or 20 years from now. I consistantly tell people, “AI is as bad as it will ever be today, and it will continue to get better from here.”
Here’s to the future of AI; may it be brighter than I can imagine and even more fun!
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