Look, Ma! AI Can Program!

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

My friend, William Neil, recently wrote an app. Rather, he convinced AI to write an app for him. And he recorded himself doing it!

If you’re technical, you might enjoy watching it. Or, if you find recordings of machines generating machine-y looking things soothing like ASMR.

William chose one of my collaboration workouts as the subject of his app. I host a monthly series of workouts called Staying Strategic as part of my Collaboration Gym. The first two workouts is something called Question Dumping — literally dumping whatever questions or top-of-mind for you at the moment, then doing a little organizing and answering. Participants do their work in Google Docs, and I prompt and coach them along the way.

William did the program earlier this year, and he asked me if I had ever thought of creating an app version of my workouts. As a matter of fact, I’ve often thought about this. So, he built one!

We had an hour-long conversation where I walked him through how I thought it should work, then he spent at least another hour refining the requirements using ChatGPT as a kind of secretary while he went on a walk (as he describes in the video). Building / testing / debugging an iteration of the app took about an hour total.

I haven’t done any serious coding in decades. I also haven’t played with coding using AI, although I’ve had some interesting conversations with friends, and I’ve been following musings from Jon Udell, Les Orchard, and Harper Reed. (I also enjoy Mike Hoye’s general commentary and critiques.) So it was fun to have William walk me through the process, and I’m so glad he recorded this and shared it with the wider world.

It’s a simple, non-production quality app. I think an experienced engineer could also build it in about an hour, with other potential benefits, such as higher code quality. It also would have cost at least an order of magnitude more. Maybe the benefits outweigh the costs in the long run. I wonder about things like maintainability and how easy it is for LLMs to refactor a codebase with minimal human intervention. And, I’m also conscious of the Bitter Lesson.

Now about that app…

For many years now, even before GPT-3, my friend, James Cham, has talked about the potential of AI replacing overpriced strategy consultants. If you look at the mechanics of what most traditional strategy consultants do, this is a no-brainer. But the dirty little secret of Big Consulting is that they’re rarely hired for said mechanics.

So I don’t think that AI will replace Big Consulting (although it may drive the cost down). But I do think that many groups legitimately want to align their people around good strategy. This is why I created Staying Strategic, which is an evolution of something I’ve been tinkering with for my whole career. And I think that AI could not only help scale workouts like Staying Strategic, but it could enable new and interesting possibilities. The fact that AI could help create the tools that would enable AI to help us be more strategic is just meta icing on the cake.

Farting Around

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

My friend, Renee, recently mentioned The Red Hand Files to me, and she shared this post with me as an example of Nick Cave’s writing and engagement. The post was a response to a question from a reader asking about the benefits of using ChatGPT to write song lyrics. The whole post is lovely and funny and short, but here’s a taste:

In the story of the creation, God makes the world, and everything in it, in six days. On the seventh day he rests. The day of rest is significant because it suggests that the creation required a certain effort on God’s part, that some form of artistic struggle had taken place. This struggle is the validating impulse that gives God’s world its intrinsic meaning. The world becomes more than just an object full of other objects, rather it is imbued with the vital spirit, the pneuma, of its creator.

ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.

…

As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water. It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.

Reading this reminded me of this 2005 exchange between David Brancaccio and Kurt Vonnegut about Vonnegut’s book, A Man Without a Country:

DAVID BRANCACCIO: There’s a little sweet moment, I’ve got to say, in a very intense book — your latest — in which you’re heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say, “I’m going to buy an envelope.”

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: What happens then?

KURT VONNEGUT: Oh, she says, “Well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?” And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around.

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

I think there’s a lot of truth to what both Cave and Vonnegut said, and I think it’s helpful to keep in mind as machines continue to push us to remember what it means to be human. But maybe there’s a middle ground.

Today is my nephew’s birthday. This morning, Google Photos put together a little montage of photos of the two of us over the years. I spend more time than the average person looking at and curating my photos, but I was still moved by the arrangement this tool had pulled together automatically without any creative struggle or farting around on my part.

I know there’s a world where tools like ChatGPT augment rather than try to replace the human experience. We do have agency as to whether or not this happens, although how much, I do not know. Either way, it helps to be reminded that we are dancing animals over and over and over again, and to proceed accordingly.