Technology

That's because we're using it wrong. It's not a genie you go to for answers to your problems, it's mighty putty. You could build a house out of it, but it's wildly expensive and not at all worth it. But if you want to stick a glass bottle to a tree, or fix a broken plastic shell back together, it's great

For example, you can have it do a web search, read through the results to see if it actually contains what you're looking for, then summarize what it found and let you jump right there to evaluate yourself. You could have it listen to your podcasts and tag them by topic. You could write a normal program to generate a name and traits of a game character, then have the AI write flavor text and dialog trees for quest chains

Those are some projects I've used AI for - specifically, local AI running on my old computer. I'm looking to build a new one

I also use chat gpt to write simple but tedious code on a weekly basis for my normal job - things like "build a class to represent this db object". I don't trust it to do anything that's not straightforward - I don't trust myself to do anything tedious

The AI is not an expert, I am. The AI is happy to do busy work, every second of it increases my stress level. AI is tireless, it can work while I sleep. AI is not efficient, but it's flexible. My code is efficient, but it is not flexible

As a part of a system, AI is the link between unstructured data and code, which needs structure. It let's you do things that would have required a 24/7 team of dozens of employees. It also is unable to replace a single human - just like a computer

That's my philosophy at least, after approaching LLMs as a new type of tool and studying them as a developer. Like anything else, I ran it on my own computer and poked and prodded it until I saw the patterns. I learned what it could do, and what it struggled to do. I learned how to use it, I developed methodologies. I learned how to detect and undo "rampancy", a number of different failure states where it degrades into nonsense. And I learned how to use it as another tool in my toolbox, and I pride myself on using the right tool for the job

This is a useful tool - I repeatedly have used it to do things I couldn't have done without it. This is a new tool - artisans don't know how to use it yet. I can build incredible things with this tool with what I know now, and other people are developing their own techniques to great effect. We will learn how to use this tool, even in its current state. It will take time, its use may not be obvious, but this is a very useful tool