buthowjejddjeu

It’s hard not to be cynical as a dev. Every time I see a non-dev messing around with tooling I feel pain and discomfort.

You can bet your ass I can make AI make a consistent and repeatable powerpoint deck.

Problem is a) the need to produce this “deck” is questionable, at best and b) thinking in “powerpoint” is severely lobotomizing and limits you and your company in ways I find hard to even enumerate.

The exact same bullshit is going on with “word”. People can’t separate content from form apparently and that’s a debilitating disability no AI can fix. Creating AI to help you with “word” documents is an infinitude of stupidity so dark and so deep it makes my eyes water and fear for the future of humanity.

All I can say is imagine you do NOT have “powerpoint”. Let’s say all you have is a whiteboard with a 10% pen so you have to keep it short. What do you intend to communicate? Drill down and stop thinking in “powerpoint” and start thinking in content.

Content and form are orthogonal, repeat after me.

Once you have a stable and consistent information schema you can create “decks” till the cows come home and they’ll all be great. You won’t even need special AI for it in all likelihood. If you do not have a firm handle on the payload itself you’ll be forever tangling with “fonts” and “charts” getting none the wiser.

In my experience it has improved a bit, but 90% of my normies still have no idea. (It was 100% before)

Talent to do.. what? This could mean a lot of things.

Navigating astronomically huge fundamentally not so hard but still really tangly and hairy projects requiring both excellent short- and long-term vision in an overheated domain with angry people and lots of money is a skill all of its own.

You jest, but clever folks with “dangerous knowledge” have to deal with pretty hefty guardrails.

I am not against AI but I do wonder how you guys handle the fact this leaks all your code and is stored forever on servers belonging to God knows who?

I “trust” OpenAI and Anthropic (somewhat) but to be honest I still feel only safe using it on code without any secret sauce whatsoever. Luckily that’s a lot of code, but still. I wonder how others are looking at this?

(FYI I feel the same about Github and we also don’t store our code there)