About two years ago, I was at one of my Hardware Happy Hour evenings and one of the guys showed what he was doing with generative AI.
He showed a logo he’d developed. Which was interesting, as I was already playing with DALL-E and Midjourney at the time.
Then he said ChatGPT was great with code. I had known of GitHub’s Copilot by then, but as I didn’t use it, I didn’t think of it. But when he mentioned ChatGPT, I had to give it a try.
And I did. I used it much like I use text-based genAI today – as a way to improve the things _I_ write. ChatGPT was quite helpful in solving bugs, error messages, and the like. ChatGPT (who I call Geoffrey) was helpful in a lot of my coding, tho I used it in specific way. Geoffrey was not so good with logic or some more complex coding. And it made weird mistakes. I still had to know what I was doing.
Nonetheless, I looked forward to going back to some earlier projects that were stumped by more complex programming or could use a clean up.
Once more with feeling
Yesterday I had some free time. I had been rummaging thru my electronics for some item and stumbled upon an M5-Watch StickC Plus. I had bought it for a project a long time ago, but was frustrated with the documentation at the time, so put it aside. I wondered if Claude, with whom I had a Pro plan and have taken a shine to, was up for some coding fun with this thing.
In the back of my mind I always had Matt Webb’s wonder at making a iPhone app he always wanted. I had not had any luck to date with Geoffrey doing the thinking. But these models get better, don’t they?
And I am hooked on Claude’s projects (a folder of documents to refer to) and artefacts (separate snippets of info that are easy to navigate and use).
Step by step
I started by introducing Claude to the M5StickCPlus by sharing the product page. Then we batted about some thoughts on what to do with it. We settled on a Space Invaders sort of game. The game was actually bouncing around my head these past few days, so sounded right to start with.
Interestingly, Claude guided me step by step in making the game. And I let it unleash its creativity in how the game would look. Basically, I was the navigator and it was the driver taking my feature requests and preferences. And I provided feedback at every stage as we improved game play, the look and feel, and the code.
OK, while Claude did a lot of the heavy lifting, I still needed to know how to use the Arduino IDE, move around the code (Claude would give me snippets to add rather than the whole code every time), and catch some issues here an there (really Claude only saw the full code a few times).
Mind blown
What struck me was the creativity Claude showed. How it had a vision (obviously based on the real classic game) and we collaborated over this vision. I also added a few features I wanted to see and Claude was game. So it was a real driver-navigator partnership (as in pair programming) .
I was also impressed by how rapidly Claude was able to figure out all the game logic. I’ve never designed a game before, so don’t really know so well how to think in sprites, collisions, game play. Claude could have gone adding features for ever, such as the UFO, sounds, power-ups, leaderboard. But I stopped when I had a simple decent game to play with.
I looked at some time stamps (alas, neither Claude or Geoffrey keep time stamps of the convos – which I always look for) and seems we put in 4-5 hours of total leisurely work.
The one-person AI company
I heard that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, referred to a one-person AI company becoming a unicorn – one person, using AI tools (presumably dataAI and genAI), could build a company valued at $1B.
OK, so I’m not gonna build a $1B company. But in the past month I have used Claude in many more business-focused ways – exploring new commercialization opportunities, coming up with new services for my wife’s business, toying with a biz plan. I can see Claude, which BTW, for what I use it for is way better that Geoffrey (sorry G), becoming a vital tool to multiply and complement my own abilities.
Isn’t that the promise of genAI?
edited 02mon24 to refer to pair programming (I could not remember the term so said producer-coder)
