The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do
-John McCarthy

In my real life I’m a software engineer (technically a sdet but six of one…).

  • When I was just getting started we learned by experimenting, by reading expensive books and magazines, and maybe people in person… if you were lucky to have other people around you interested (I’m an oldhead).
  • Then we had the internet and we learned from each other.
  • Now we have ai and we stop learning?

I don’t know.

It kind of feels like when everyone in baseball started taking steroids. Yeah, I can not take steroids… but then I’m completing with everyone who is. Is it a disadvantage?

When I first started getting paid for what I liked doing for fun, I told my dad “I’m just a qa engineer, yeah I write automated testing but i’m not a developer.” He was the first to ask me what’s the difference.

Then as I started believing in myself, I got a job at start up health data company. There my direct boss at the time was a legit for real rocket scientist that used to work at NASA. Other people had degrees from MIT. Many people had medical backgrounds, being a company trying to help cancer patients and all.

This was my first (and last) taste of true imposter syndrome. What was I doing here with these people. I’m no where near as good as them.

I had the benefit of being hired for a new project that wasn’t started yet. I got to see that no one knows anything and experience is what matters and I’m still with that company (kinda they got folded into a new company but we brought back the same team from the first company).

Anyway…

This is all a preamble to say I just started truly playing with vibe coding. I’m late to the game yes.

When I upgraded my macbook, I got one with 128gb of unified memory so I could play with local models without spending a pile of money. Until recently I was just asking it questions and tied in into autocomplete through some extensions. It was cool, but nothing amazing.

Then work gave us access to their instance and claude code. Then I added claude to my personal setup. Then I started playing with mcps (end of line). Then I got excited and scared.

With a the right prompting and a little back and forth, claude can do something in hours that used to take days. Do you hate iterating over data and building out json… let claude do it. Is the data in google and your not sure how to access it without downloading it and you don’t want to read google api documentation… let claude do it. Do you hate creating page object models and just want to get to automating tests… let claude do it.

Now you still have to know enough to get claude setup and explain what you want, but how long until it can decide for you?

Even a local setup was able to create a fully documented python script for downloading files from subreddits. I already had the api keys because I was working on this in the past and put it down, but it told me how to get them from reddit. It built in options for downloading all images by time or by; hot, new, top, rising. An argument to give it an output folder. An argument for getting x number of images and not all. It did all that by itself. I just told it I wanted to download images from a subreddit using python.

Could I have figured that out all by myself? Yes absolutely. Not as fast, but yes. Would I have enjoyed it? Sometimes I get stuck and really enjoy figuring out why I’m stuck. After I figure it out though and apply the fix and have to do the boring stuff I sometimes just stop. Now I guess I can get AI to do it for me.

In less than an hour I was able to grab all the images from r/EdibleButtholes to feed a digital photo frame and then could go slack off with the rest of my saturday.

It felt like cheating but if it gives me time back to do other things…
And if everyone else is doing it…