I think AI is the perfect innovation as we reach the crash point of the climate crisis. Who cares if we burn more CO2 now, the effect is miniscule for the explosive crisis that could be coming any day or week. One that we have no ability to recover from. To say it's unenvironmental would be like complaining that you want more Pepsi from the flight attendant while the plane is crashing into a small city. Anyway, but maybe after the crash, one data center will survive, and maybe the beauty that our civilization created will be sustained.#
Inside the big AI companies they are certainly AI-izing every app conceivable, and even teaching the AI's how to AI'ize, because AI inside a standard productivity app which includes social network software will be one of the basic UI tools, and that means hidden technology like SQL databases can now be end user products, so the vision of the designers of SQL that they would make a database a manager could program, would finally be realized. #
I'm an independent developer working in Claude Code, we're in the endgame of a product cycle, where the core is working and it can be used for the thing it was designed to do (biggest consideration). This is the time when you need users banging on it and reporting problems. People who write good bug reports. The only time I really had that down was at Living Videotext, a small company, but big enough to have employees doing QA and tech support. They were really good testers, they had the right perspective and an incentive, = anything we caught before shipping wouldn't become a support problem once the product was out there in user land. #
Fast forward to the 2020's where I have done three products and am working on a fourth, and I have nothing close to the kind of testing support I had in the 80s. That made the work more difficult, slower and I took fewer detours, and one time, awfully -- a serious design error was caught only after it shipped and I was ready to move on to something else. #
The point -- this handicap for individual programmers without staff QA people, we now have something even better than what we had in the 80s. Claude can do extensive testing of the product in the browser, "seeing" what the user would see. And it never gets tired. You just have to think to ask it to do it. It is so liberating. #
And by far the best people to create and manage it would be experienced QA people. They should design and run the tests and sign off on the quality of the software, so we can be sure users are getting something great. And we can do great QA in places we never could really do it before because no matter how good users are, a person who does it for a living with experience can't be replaced.#
One of the silver linings of AI use is that it makes you a better writer. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)