There have been a couple of interesting pieces in the ‘AI’ space over the last few days.

In a long Twitter post Matt Shumer writes breathlessly about how AI is changing software development, and how it’s going to change everything else. It feels simultaneously celebratory and sort of panicky.

It’s had a lot of pushback, including this piece from Om Malik, which has the advantage of linking to several other pieces that comment on Shumer’s. Shumer doesn’t have the luxury — or rather, the standard, decades-old convention — of linking to the things he refers to, because he’s writing on Twitter. Which has added the capability of publishing long posts, at least for blue-tick-verified users, which is good; but has not seen fit to include standard web feature like links, which is bad.

For me, he shoots himself in the foot with this exhortation:

If you’ve always wanted to write a book but couldn’t find the time or struggled with the writing, you can work with AI to get it done.

Ahahaha. No. That’s not what writing a book is. Writing a book — the clue is in the term — requires writing, which takes time, and craft, and practice… Getting your friendly neighbourhood AI to do it for you is very much what I referred to as cheating .

Anyway, both are worth a read, and the others Om links to, too. For me, they have contributed to a surprising change I’ve been noticing in myself. You’ll recall I wrote about feeling revulsion towards the modern AI situation. I find that feeling is fading, replaced with a sceptical interest.

Of course, I can no more explain why that change is happening, than I could the revulsion in the first place. Perhaps it’s just the ongoing piling on of the conversation. If anything, I’m getting bored of hearing people talk about AI on tech podcasts.

However, there is a change I’d like to make to some code at work that I think might work well as a test for possible uses I might have for the technology. It’s not a change to how something functions, just to how that functionality is implemented. It’s not essential, but it will make some things easier in the future.

And since we’ve got this GitHub Copilot thing, and it has access to various models, I think I’m going to give it a try next week. I’ll report back here.