Experiments with AI

The progress AI has made in a past few months is astonishing. Thinking back a year or two, it was just a toy to use for fun language games. Today it's better than me at most computer programming tasks, and equivalent to a smart entry level employee in a lot of professional domains - it is amazing at making a good first draft, or at synthesizing and critiquing work from a subject matter expert - it's a great researcher and a great sounding board for my work.

I can't share a lot of examples from my day job, but I can share some side projects as I make them. My first one is a simple piggybank app I can self host. It lets me create "accounts" for my kids, "pay" interest, and avoid having stacks of small change around my desk to keep track of tooth fairy money.

It's amazing how simple the "build process" was - I co-created a product requirement document with AI, and the claude did the entire development process. When the build ran into issues, I passed the errors and it resolved them. For a dabbler like me, it's an incredible accelerator for my tech-adjacent side projects