We like to stay ahead of the curve here at Resolution. So when I heard people were writing actual web applications with large language model chatbots, I spent $20 on the GPT4 version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and got right to work.
Here’s a little window into today’s working session:
Is this easier than working with skilled, experienced professionals? In a way… absolutely! This thing does exactly what I tell it, works incredibly fast, and is happy to allow me to change my mind whenever I want, as many times as I want. I feel absolutely no guilt at all doing things like pivoting completely and dumping an entire code base that would cause normal, human software developers to push me into traffic or at least passive-aggressively respond to my meeting invites with “MAYBE”. (BTW, I invented that move, so… respect.)
However, there are downsides. For instance… well, here’s where we stand as of today, product wise.
Pretty bad! I think the math works, but it’s hard to tell because this entire thing is totally illegible, despite the cheery confirmation of my robot engineering department that the problem had been addressed. (UPDATE: The math definitely does not work, at all.) It’s hard to say that I can’t make this any better, because I probably can! I’ll keep yelling at this thing every couple of hours and it will keep making changes without even a scintilla of human empathy or understanding and send them to me in chunks of truncated Python that I copy and paste in a text editor with a hopeful, utterly clueless look on my face.
The future is here! Somehow, though, I don’t think the AI Edition of Resolution is going to surpass the slow-cooked, human-architected production version anytime soon. Sorry, Brian.