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Whatever AI is doing to how we find / share information aside, I do think that one under appreciated effect is on how software (and other things) get built. Lowering the barrier to entry for writing code and other tasks feels democratizing , but we may just not have had enough time to see how that hopefully has positive effects a decade out.

Its funny how fast we forget that when Google came out and arguably now many would laugh at the statement "all the good, companies like Google brought to the internet"

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what value do we get from AI?
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Last month I rebuilt my pool's plumbing system with the help of YouTube and GPT. I was quoted $6k and it ended up costing me about $1k of materials and a few days of work. This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before.

It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I had it prepare an SVG of the whole assembly with all the measurements and parts labeled.

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I'm glad it went well for you. But I run a not-for-profit pinball museum, and I have specifically had to ban volunteer repairpeople from using the chatbots because it will confidently propose idiotically wrong solutions. Which will then get proposed to me, or just directly applied, with equal confidence. At this point I'd rather hear, "My horoscope said..." than "ChatGPT said..."

I expect that it's good for common use cases that's well documented. But then, so are a lot of other approaches.

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It’s likely it missed some crucial subtlety that will come to bite you in the ass down the line.

That’s the thing with AI - its responses sound plausible enough to non-experts but time and time again I see experts in any given field being able to identify AI content by pinpointing subtle but crucial errors. That’s one of its dangers - it gives you enough confidence to shoot yourself in the foot.

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I hope what you’ll discover to be wrong needs only $5000 of repairs.
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I've love to know more about how you did this. Was it the underground plumbing or your pump system above ground. This is one of the few areas of the home I have little understanding of.
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Answers to a lot of questions, with breadth, depth and nuance. And assistance in carrying out work on a lot of fields, not just programming.
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breadth, depth and nuance

If ever there were three adjectives which do NOT apply to generative AI...

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It's really good at writing code.
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It’s really good at writing bad code - something that superficially works but is badly architected, abstracted, or wrong in a subtle way.

Only a novice would look at ai code and say “wow this is good”.

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It’s good at all kinds of stuff that is search adjacent, “find amesent parks with water feature within 100 miles of me that have rv parking nearby”, etc
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This will of course never be underminded by aggressive marketing
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Ehhhhh it’s faster at typing code. Writing in a full agentic mode, we’ve only experienced slop.
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If typing is the bottleneck you're working in too low-level of a language. Use more abstraction.
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I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop that I let Claude Code sysadmin. It makes it really easy to self-host open source stuff, and if there are issues it can fix them too.

Funnily enough, I've had a somewhat mixed-to-hostile response when trying to upstream the vibecoded fixes, so I suspect using an LLM to fix broken open-source software (that human maintainers don't have the time to fix themselves, nor the humility to accept an LLM-authored fix) will become more of a thing going forward too.

Oh, it's also been identifying a bunch of patterns in sales data for my business that has been increasing monthly profit consistently since last November (around $4,000 USD, every month, cumulatively so far with no sign of slowing down - could easily be $10k/mo in increased gains by end of financial year).

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