I have no formal software development training, but I'm building my own tools with AI coding agents.
So far, a to-do list app, a tool for extracting video transcripts, and some more ambitious projects I'm still working on.
I'm also experimenting with AI agents to take boring admin off my hands.
It's amazing what you can do with these tools now, even without a tech background.
I'm curious to see how far I can take it, and I'll be sharing what I build, what works, what fails, and what I learn.
I'm wildly optimistic about where all this is heading for humanity, and fascinated by the bigger mysteries too: consciousness, intelligence and the nature of reality.
My long-term ambition is to heal the world and build a quadrillion-dollar empire.
Progress so far: one to-do list app.
If that sounds like your kind of adventure, let's connect.
@TonyChanBuilds Not yet. I'm planning to in the next couple of weeks or so. For now, I'm just enjoying hearing about other people's experiences with it because it's getting a lot of rave reviews.
Curious to see what you find.
@cheenaedo@SOwashington26 Well, it depends how they say it. If it's disrespectful and the intentions are obvious, I wouldn't make a scene.
I'd just let them discover, quite mysteriously, that my number no longer works. π
@EXM7777 I see this differently. If you're building something, solving problems and figuring out why things work, it's hard not to learn along the way.
But if you're just accepting answers without thinking, questioning or applying anything, then that's a different story.
Are we sure that software isn't getting 10x better? And how are we defining 10x better?
If we're measuring revenue or traditional productivity, perhaps not.
People can now build their own tools to solve everyday problems that previously weren't worth a developer's time. That's a massive step forward.
Perhaps 10x, perhaps 1,000x in utility.
Apart from time saving, those quality of life improvements aren't easy to capture using traditional measures of what makes software better.
I would say social conditioning is the biggest factor we're taught from an early age to defer to established authorities and to accept conventional thinking.
Questioning either has often invites ridicule. So people learn to consistently color within the lines.
The irony is that many great advances came from challenging what everyone thought they knew.
Skepticism is healthy, but dogmatic clinging to conventional thinking regardless of what new evidence shows is the wrong way to go.
@Cyborg21@X This is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
People use dictation, text editors and AI, to draft perfectly legitimate replies.
If just pasting becomes a reason to penalize them, you end up punishing people who've done nothing wrong.
@elonmusk@X this needs a rethink.
@TekonBurns They've got to fix it. If you're paying $200 for a fresh month, you should at least know when you can actually use it.
A renewal, at any subscription level, not just $200, should immediately refresh usage. Paying again only to remain locked out is absolutely nuts.
If cancelling an AI subscription means losing years of personal context, something has gone badly wrong.
Think about how much your AI knows about you. What you're working towards, the projects you've tackled, the decisions you've made and why.
Over time, that knowledge becomes incredibly valuable. Your AI remembers what you've tried, what worked, what didn't, and can pick up where you left off without needing everything explained again.
Now imagine a better AI comes along, or your current provider doubles its prices.
You want to leave. Fair enough.
Some providers already let you export conversations or transfer memories. That's progress.
I want to be able to take the useful knowledge my AI has accumulated and move it to another provider without having to spend hours reconstructing it.
AI companies have every reason to build products that keep customers coming back. I have no problem with that.
But I want to stay because their product is the best, not because leaving means starting my digital life from scratch.
AI might solve scarcity long before we solve the problem of meaning.
Imagine a future where intelligent machines produce all the necessities. Food, housing, transport and healthcare are universally accessible.
Work becomes a choice, rather than a condition of survival. Sounds great.
But what happens when the struggle to survive is no longer the organising principle of our lives?
We'd still want friendships, families, things to look forward to and the satisfaction of achieving difficult things that we did voluntarily.
And we'd still have to figure out what makes us happy, what gives our lives meaning, and how to live with ourselves.
Having more of everything wouldn't automatically answer those questions.
But it could give us something many people have rarely enjoyed: the freedom to explore them without so much of our energy being consumed by survival.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of AI will be giving us the time and energy to discover what we actually want from life.