Automation, take 10
Someday—someday!—I'll pull in the archives here. I'll spend useless hours copying and pasting from the old into this new. Somewhere out there, in The Old, is a few posts about automation. I'd like to point you there, Dear Reader, but I'd also like to read it myself just to see if I was going to write the same thing over again.
No matter. For everything that getting older takes away, it also gives back in the freedom to not care or to forget or whatever it is and tell the same story again, yet again, an old skipping record (red flag reference for Old right there) stuck in the same radius from which it will never move beyond without intervention.
None of that, per usual, is the point.
The point was, I guess, what things I want The Robots to finally come and wrest from my cold, dumb hands and just do for me so I don't have to. Don't make me copypaste again. Do it for me, Mr. Robot.
I don't work with or know many people who use some kind of large language model software product to do their work or... whatever the rest of it is when you're not at work. I know one guy at work who uses Copilot effectively to help him build software. My wife uses ChatGPT to design things around the house. (She'll never see this, so I have no reason to pose, but she is extremely effective at understanding some kind of specification for home design, say, what elements need to be incorporated into a room or porch, and then translating that specification into something the software tool can use to make recommendations and draw prospective images. I feel like that minimizes the activity, but it's something that engineers that I know could learn from.)
I feel like I have about three use cases for AI software suggestion tools:
- Do the things I've done a thousand times, but don't remember the syntax for how to do off the top of my head. I think the most frequent example is something like when I'm using Python and want to open a file. I've done it a thousand times, and I always have to look it up. No more, my AI friend will do it for me.
- Do the things I have no idea how to do correctly, but I want to understand and I'll come back to later. The most pertinent example to me now is how to make some machine vision models for [things at work]. I'm interested in the topic. I'll put in the time to figure it out eventually. But I need something that works Good Enough today.
- Things that are Actively Disinteresting. I do not care how to connect to AWS. Or Google Cloud. Or setting up a session with a database. I'm glad that there are people who know how to do this, but I'm also glad that it isn't me. Just give me some code that works so I can do the parts I like.
That's it, really. I use coding assist tools like a fastbreak in basketball, passing the ball forward to the tool, that passes it back to me, and so on, until someone lays it in the basket.
Using the tools at home is useful, I know. I believe it. I don't need to be convinced. But I just hate the word Efficiency when it comes to home. Or Productivity. Let me leave that at work. Efficiency is cold, and home should be warm. I've used Copilot to find me recipes for chicken breasts that I had in the refrigerator, but I felt like that was an intrusion of sorts. (They were pretty good though, lemon and cumin leading the way.)
Stream of consciousness nonsense. That's how it goes. I'm looking forward to when the hype dies down, and a tool can just be a tool, not a revolution, not the greatest thing since sliced bread. Sometimes—most of the time—I'm not looking for something that changes my life, I'm just looking for something that turns a screw or pounds a nail. I do worry about forgetting what it is, exactly, that screws and nails do, and why I want to use them, and what larger things can be built with them.