Tag: Artificial intelligence

  • Let me take one step back on the crazy AI train…

    Let me take one step back on the crazy AI train…

    This is a follow-up to a May 2024 post titled Let me off this crazy AI train!
    While this post is discussing AI, none of it has been generated by AI.

    It has been almost 22 months since that post, and the market and attitude to AI has changed significantly.
    If there is anything that I have learned within the last year when it comes to AI is that I need to adapt or be left behind.

    This has been the most difficult thing that I have reversed course on.

    I don’t use AI for my paid job. That is plain and simple.

    Do I fear that I would be ‘replaced’ by AI? No.

    Why? I have seen the horror stories from people trying to contact companies and being met with an AI Chatbot. It doesn’t work.
    And it’s not because of ‘maturity’, it is because of GDPR and Data Protection laws. It would be a nightmare if AI could read, and write PII (including credit/debit card information) without any oversight. That is why most of the bots are just the documentation readers.

    But the biggest thing for me is the human aspect of customer service. With AI, it is non-existent. Sure it can be a bit ‘quirky’ or have basic humanization, but the actual ‘feeling’ of talking to a human is not there. And that is where a lot of companies are failing.

    So I am using it for personal use cases.

    It is helping me tackle repetitive tasks that I normally carry out.
    Perhaps more than others, and in ways that I would never have.

    The ‘turn’ came about at the end of February.

    Back in September 2025, I implemented a ‘Remote Category’ on my forum Caint, which runs NodeBB.

    It was to pull in all the posts from the Fediverse and display them in one place.
    Only problem is, I couldn’t move, rename it or even remove it, so it was stuck at the top of the forum called “Uncategorized”

    I raised a query with the developers of NodeBB, and I was told to remove it via editing the MongoDB database.

    OK, that makes sense. But I had no knowledge of MongoDB, and the documentation for MongoDB wasn’t answering my question, or I was looking at the wrong information. I did follow-up in that same thread some time later as to what the commands would be to fix it… But I never got a response.

    Out of some frustration, I decided to use AI. This came about after watching Jamie Pine on Twitch developing Spacebot one night. He was using a CLI tool called OpenCode.

    I decided to download it and try it out. They were nice to include free models such as Minimax 2.5

    After a back-and-forth conversation with the AI and attempting fixes, it was ultimately resolved in under an hour!

    I sat back in my chair and said “Wow” audibly. Before I moved on, I didn’t want to be that guy that says “I fixed it” and then ditched the forum thread… I responded with the commands I used to fix the issue.

    In addition to that, I have had it help me create backup scripts, set up complex cron jobs and automate other bits and pieces that I have been doing for years.

    So what did I know before the end of February? I knew about certain AI companies and their models including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Llama.

    Each of these companies has different ‘models’ with different ‘versions’ within itself (GPT-5, GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus, Gemini 3.1), and there seems to be 100s of different models with seemingly different purposes.

    Some of the terminology and differences between models are still foreign to me, but I am slowly learning.
    At the end of the day, I can assume that most of these models are similar enough, but one does slightly better for certain work than others.

    I am subscribed to Claude Pro. I am using the desktop and mobile app to answer questions and using it alongside OpenCode. I have used it to generate a website (it won’t go live any time soon… this is just for playing around)

    While I will be using AI for vibecoding purposes, I am not going to be using it for generating posters, images or music. That is something that I am still against.

    I am not sure what else I am going to be using AI for in the short-term, but it would be good if it could help me in certain video games (i.e. Guide me on how to get X or Y item or track accomplishments)

    I understand that there will be push back on this, and I can agree with the environmental impacts, the inaccuracy of responses of AI, but if I don’t adapt… I will be left behind and in some cases, I may already be too late.