dpcan

The very end of the article hit on the best point.

If you ask AI to use HTML to create an 8.5x11 designed "poster" or "one sheet" it can do a great job that is indistinguishable from what anyone/artist can do in HTML/CSS.

But, fine-tuning is still required - like ask it to use less used fonts and less gradients :)

I'd go this direction as long as it had a real keyboard... Maybe it's time for the blackberry to reemerge.

I cannot figure out what people are doing to spend all this money.

I have used a $60 per month Cursor plan on auto, and have never come close to using up my included usage, and I probably have it planning and coding and working for me all through the evenings 4 nights a week.

What on earth are people doing differently that it's costing them so much?

Maybe enabling on-demand usage or other paid models, or on higher modes? What are you doing that requires this? The output from Auto for me is crazy good for the tasks I'm working on, and have yet to run into an issue where it couldn't perform at a high enough level.

We have been interviewing people at work to join our team and they tell us they use $2K per month in tokens with their current employers.... I can't even fathom what's going on here where that would be happening.

I’m a devils advocate on this argument.

Yes, a big company can take it away, but I think they have to leave it online long enough to get your money’s worth.

So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.

The problem with “code quality” and LLM’s taking over your first 3 “pillars” is basically that LLM’s don’t care.

I recently had Cursor evaluate a huge code base that we took over. All public stuff, nothing scary security wise, but it was so convoluted that it was taking me forever to find the bugs. It was written by a person, I should add.

I did this in cursor and after one prompt using Plan, it found all the bugs, created a plan to fix them, it looked good, and I had the agent create the fix.

It took 30 minutes.

The client had this project in the hands of another company without ai tools and they couldn’t fix the bugs she told them about.

So my point is, if we are holding on to our jobs for dear life on the basis that “code quality” matters, you might as well kick down the 4th pillar. Like I said, the LLM does not care.

Day 1.

I remember firing up gpt and asking for some code. It was simple JavaScript to solve a problem and I knew immediately, this was the beginning of the end for software development as we knew it.

I built an app I struggled to create for years in a weekend.

Started playing with the API, etc.

I was very much in my oh-no period that very first few months.

You can ask AI to comment an entire code base now in as much detail as you need.

Yes, constantly.

I don’t know what I do differently, but I can get Cursor to do exactly what I want all the time.

Maybe it’s because it takes more time and effort, and I don’t connect to GitHub or actual databases, nor do I allow it to run terminal commands 99% of the time.

I have instructions for it to write up readme files of everything I need to know about what it has done. I’ve provided instructions and created an allow list of commands so it creates local backups of files before it touches them, and I always proceed through a plan process for any task that is slightly more complicated, followed by plan cleanup, and execution. I’m super specific about my tech stack and coding expectations too. Tests can be hard to prompt, I’ll sometimes just write those up by hand.

Also, I’ve never had to pay over my $60 a month pro plan price tag. I can’t figure out how others are even doing this.

At any rate, I think the problem appears to be the blind commands of “make this thing, make it good, no bugs” and “this broke. Fix!” I kid you not, I see this all the time with devs. Not at all saying this is what you do, just saying it’s out there.

And “high quality code” doesn’t actually mean anything. You have to define what that means to you. Good code to me may be slop to you, but who knows unless it is defined.

For personal projects:

Used ai to create my own mind mapping tool for private use.

I also created a private cursor-like / loveable-like tool that I can use for my own vibe code prototyping on the go with my phone.

When it comes to games I absolutely don’t care what they used AI for because the point of games is to be fun.

If it’s fun and you used AI, that’s fine with me. The game served its purpose.

The line for me is copyright on images. If you use ai to generate images to copy a popular game art style, I think that’s over the line. Create your own art or pay the artist.

Code however, I see it as a tool. You wouldn’t scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done. So to me, AI for coding isn’t any different than hiring a programmer to do the work for you. No problem there.

That being said, I do game dev, and using AI to help figure out an algorithm or do the work of creating my inputs code, etc is a big time saver. However, at the moment, it really struggles with anything else because it has no vision and explaining to it how to put code together for a weird game mechanic or level generation reminds me of that game where you explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the 3rd grade, and you tell your teacher to put the peanut butter on the bread and she scoops it out with her hand…

Adobe Fireworks - easiest vector / photo editor crossover app there ever was.

Adobe Animate is still just Flash from a tool-standoint.

Are you referring to the SWF file format?

I feel like I can't really have fun and be myself when I see people shooting video all around me.

I like to be silly with my kids and close friends, I like to act out around the people who find me fun or funny. But the rest of the world would ridicule me, or make fun of me, or make me a meme possibly.

This makes me sad because as a young man I could just be out there and fun, and at the end of the day, I held a place in the memories of my closest friends, maybe a handful of bystanders. But today, I could be gif'd and immortalized for my silly actions without my permission.

I disagree with the sentiment, you're in public, it's fair game. That just means I have to bend to your world-view, and you don't have to be considerate of mine.

My favorite example, and the ones I show my team and my employer, is that I can have AI look at a string of fields for my database table and generate all the views for the display, add, and edit forms for those fields in exactly the way I instruct, and that saves me as much as 30 minutes every time I do it. If I do this 8 times in a day, that would save me about 4 hours. Especially when those forms require things like lookups and extra JavaScript functionality.

Another great example, is the power of tabbing with Cursor. If I want to change the parameters of a function in my React app, I can be at one of the functions anywhere in my screen, add a variable that relates to what is being rendered, and I can now quickly tab through to find all the spots that also are affected in that screen, and then it usually helps apply the changes to the function. It's like smart search and replace where I can see every change that needs made but it knows how to make it more intelligently than just replacing a line of code - and I didn't have to write the regex to find it, AND it usually helps get the work done in the function as well to reflect the change. That could save me 3-5 minutes, and I could do that 5 times a day maybe, and another almost half-hour is saved.

The point is, these small things add up SO fast. Now I'm incredibly efficient because the tedious part of programming has been sped up so much.

I have a $20/month GPT subscription, and the $20/month cursor plan. I've yet to come close to going over my limits with either service. I use the unlimited Tab completions in cursor which are what end up saving me an enormous amount of time. I probably use 5 to maybe 10 chats a day in cursor, but I jump over to GPT if I think I'm going to require a few extra chats to get to the bottom of something.

I think that getting "good" at using AI means that you figure out exactly how to formulate your prompts so that the results are what you are looking for given your code base. It also means knowing when to start new chats, and when to have it focus on very specific pieces of code, and finally, knowing what it's really bad at doing.

For example, if I need to have it take a list of 20 fields and create the HTML view for the form, it can do it in a few seconds, and I know to tell it, for example, to use Bootstrap, Bootstrap icons, Bootstrap modals, responsive rows and columns, and I may want certain fields aligned certain ways, buttons in certain places for later, etc, and then I have a form - and just saved myself probably 30 minutes of typing it out and testing the alignment etc. If I do things like this 8 times a day, that's 4 hours of saved time, which is game changing for me.

This article is just simply not true for most people who have figured out how to use AI properly when coding. Since switching to Cursor, my coding speed and efficiency has probably increased 10x conservatively. When I'm using it to code in languages I've used for 25+ years, it's a breeze to look over the function it just saved me time by pre-thinking and typing it out for me. Could I have done it myself, yeah, but it would have taken longer if I even had to go lookup one tiny thing in the documentation, like order of parameters for a function, or that little syntax thing I never use...

Also, the auto-complete with tools like Cursor are mind blowing. When I can press tab to have it finish the next 4 lines of a prepared statement, or it just knows the next 5 variables I need to define because I just set up a function that will use them.... that's a huge time saver when you add it all up.

My policy is simple, don't put anything AI creates into production if you don't understand what it's doing. Essentially, I use it for speed and efficiency, not to fill in where I don't know at all what I'm doing.

This is really interesting, got it up and running very quickly.

I'm not sure what the use case is and it doesn't auto-load chromium with its own web server from what I can tell. Is it just for creating javascript CLI utilities?

Wild West Domains is a subsidiary of GoDaddy. They are basically he same company, and the Whois doesn't usually show the owner of the domain anymore, it shows the company that's keeping the owner's information private. WWD and GoDaddy both offer this service. Lookup other domains, you'll see the same thing all over the place. The whois on just about all of my domains say Wild West Domains, the others are GoDaddy or Namecheap, my personal information never comes up anymore because I opt for the privacy options.

I’ve been doing this a looooooong time. And that’s really about it.

Every time a popup or tooltip covers code around my cursor I groan in agony.

I’d probably use it if the tool tips just updated in the bottom right of my screen while I typed or something.

I own an escape room business with one, two-part, room and it does about this or much more in some months.

The problem is, unlike so many examples in these threads, this business requires every available minute of my time so it’s a little more than I bargained for. Plus there is a brick and mortar location, city regulations, etc.

You gotta REALLY love the hell out of this business to do it at all, let alone as a side project.

You know it’s going to happen:

“I want a funny road trip movie staring Jim Carey and Chris Farley, based in Europe, in the fall, where they have to rescue their mom played by Lucille ball from making the mistake of marrying a character played by an older Steve Martin.”

10 minutes later your movie is generated.

If you like it, you save it, share it, etc.

You have a queue of movies shared by your friends that they liked.

Content will be endless and generated.

Good list.

Creating your own desktop environment is an incredible “hello world” into serious and more advanced JavaScript development.

What about the simple fact that if I’m not going to the blog’s website directly, I’m not seeing or clicking on the Google adsense ads they were displaying?

Or that you weren’t typing the name of the blog into Google to find it each time, and potentially clicking a sponsored link?

The whole idea of reader hurt Google’s business model.

For me, it has now been 2.5 years since having watched any local, national or cable news.

The stuff is poison.

I also deleted Facebook around the same time to stay away from it through 3rd parties.

It is true that it has made me happier. I am free of the nonsense.

It turns out, every “big deal” only lasts a couple weeks - in terms of those of us who have no control over anything. I still hear people talk about stuff that’s happening in the news, and chuckle when they are on to some new terrifying thing that’s happening after about a week since the last terrifying thing they were freaking out about.

Like tweeting without Twitter.

I have lived by these words for many years:

“Every time I’m wrong, I learn something new.”

I repeat this to myself. I look for reasons to be wrong. Everything I think I know how to do well, I assume someone has a better way of doing it, and I want to know that way.

I don’t even stop short when it comes to religion or politics. You believe in God, convince me, that sounds great. Your political views are right? Okay, show me the evidence, I’ll listen and explore the idea.

But I do stand by what I am pretty certain is a fact if there would be consequences otherwise. That being said, I have very little confidence that I know any actual “facts”.

The entire world now has a brilliant assistant for these kinds of things - it's ChatGPT.

Every numbskull to every professor now has the ability to generate information on a scholarly level and solve problems that could take a human years of training and experience to produce.

I'm really trying hard not to get all doom and gloom about this stuff, but I'm honestly worried. It keeps me up at night.

They should have done it right the first time? That's not the world we live in.

Coworkers, associates, clients, family - everyone sends us funky data. Sometimes it's a PDF of text instead of a text file, or a picture of their computer screen with a paragraph in it, or copy-pasted text with unwanted formatting, etc, etc.

And the point of this article wasn't really about the tedious job of copy/pasting, it was that once the data was ready, instead of hunkering down and having to work through a problem with an unknown number of variables, GPT-4 can drop an answer in seconds flat. Maybe a few more if you have to tweak your prompt a few times.

Part 2 here is that we have a problem to solve, and that's how data is sent and received, and that it all needs to end up in a structural format that's usable by our AI tools.

I am thinking that writing a script that can dump textual data from literally anything I'm looking at so it's AI-ready makes a lot of sense, then we have step 1 taken care of as well for my own personal GPT-solvable situations.

I wonder how many coders have done exactly this in the last couple of weeks? Using the api to cater the chatgpt system to our liking. I’ve done the same and it’s changing the game for me. Saving hours of time jumping through that small part of a project that I knew would be the bottleneck.

I’ve gone from saying that I’ll need an hour to do something to only needing 15 minutes.

However, I’m good enough at what I do that I can find the problems in the code or notice something out of place or that could be done more securely.

I fear many won’t and lots of junk code is going to find its way into our lives. I worry about things like this when it comes to, for example, Wordpress plug-ins, or add ons to other larger tools that we use.

Every week we go through this at work STILL. I sit there with my system working perfectly. I can hear. I can talk. They can hear me. They can see me. It's fine. But there are 3 other people in there that are muted and can't figure it out, someone is called in and on their computer, echo everywhere, someone can't hear, someone can't get their mic to work, someone just gets frustrated and screams that we should "do it in person".

I just don't get it anymore. I can't figure out how any of this is challenging for anyone. Especially when they've all done it 50+ times now.

Oh, and the team member who only has her forehead in the shot? Or the person who constantly changes their background through the whole meeting? Or the person who just gets up and walks away in the middle.

Can you feel it? It's Sunday night here for me. Monday is quickly approaching and I just can't stomach the thought of doing this all over again.