This is an interesting discussion: Is AI a bubble?He likens AI to the dot com bubble when a lot of communications companies laid down fiber optic cables which were dark for many years. We're using those cables now, but with the exception of Cisco, those companies no longer exist. He's not questioning the utility of AI, he's questioning the financial chicanery.

They discuss the whole concern about entry level jobs, but I'm beginning to think that is a red herring. I'm thinking AI is a higher level language. AI is to Rust, as Rust is to assembly. These guys brought me to that conclusion, even though that was not their intent. They were talking about requiring their kids to do mental math and not use calculators. I was right at the cusp of slide rules versus calculators in 1975 when I started learning electrical engineering, and we were the first class given the option of using calculators. It was controversial in 1975, but no one would think of requiring slide rules today.

The other thing that struck me are the good practices for writing prompts. I've been watching a bunch of videos on YouTube about writing prompts. For the most part these are twenty-something's that have really taken to this technology. As I've been listening to them, it struck me that I've been doing this for years in the government contracting world. We called them A specs and B specs instead of prompts. These were non-procedural specs written at a high level and a mid level of abstraction. We had UI diagrams and formal tests cases to sign off on the correct operation of the system.

In our world "Software Engineers" were second class citizens, and the most important citizens were the "System Engineers", the people that wrote the A specs and the B specs. To be honest, I didn't like this, I wanted to be in the weeds, and for the tiny Secure XENIX project I literally did everything from the upfront research, to coding, to tech writing, to testing, to customer training, and to telephone support from the first call to the last call. I was the first man standing, and the very last at IBM when we handed it off to Trusted Information Systems.

All that said, I've been blown away at what AI can do with small applications. In many cases it even offers ideas that I didn't think of. I write the A specs, and the AI makes suggestions that I sign off on, and it writes the B specs from that, which I sign off on before it begins coding. Every line of code is written by the AI, and when it doesn't compile, it figures out why, and it fixes it. This has allowed me to create stunningly beautiful apps that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to create. I made sure I was using the top AI models, like Opus4.6 from Anthropic. Cheaper models were not effective.

This has even got my creative juices flowing. I have all sorts of ideas for doing things that I no longer have the patience to do myself. I'll keep you all posted. I hope to blow your minds with what I come up with. I haven't been this excited than when I was 15 and got my first BASIC program to work.

Here’s my app, that at least in my eyes, is stunningly beautiful. Gary's app I would not have been able to do this without AI.