A chief technical officer wanted to verify how AI could help his company before he recommended it. He describes his experience memorably:
= = = = = START QUOTE:
I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it. Twenty-five years of software engineering experience, and I’d managed to degrade my skills to the point where I felt helpless looking at code I’d directed an AI to write. I’d become a passenger in my own product development.
= = = = = END QUOTE.
I’ve never touched AI, but had a parallel experience with a much older external “helper.” My online courseware code was written in 2014, guided by the experts at Cengage. At that time I had long experience in programming but was new to JS and Responsive Web Design. Cengage told me to include the Twitter Bootstrap package, which would take care of zooming and proportioning and such. TB is 800K of totally opaque and obscure code: lots of JS, the entire Jquery package, lots of CSS, and some unused but necessary fonts. My code never explicitly called any of it, just imported it. As with AI, I had no idea what this stuff was doing, only that I was required to use it. Browsers processed all of the Twitter before they reached my own parts. Firefox debug showed a constant underbrush of 20 or 30 “ignored errors” on each page.
Back in 2022 I tried to pry it out but couldn’t make it happen. This year the ADA mandate forced me to dig deeper and pull out lots of old roots, letting HTML5 take care of things. I pulled out Twitter, made some adjustments, and this time the removal worked. It reduced the size of my lessons by 20%, and eliminated ALL the “ignored errors” clutter.
Now I can be proud. This crap is all mine, it doesn’t throw any spanners in the works, and I understand all of it. There’s no mysterious sealed bag of magic tricks riding on its back, no invisible and unfixable errors.
Polistra's Mill 