Lately, instead of writing my usual entry when I come back home, I start playing with Claude. It started on Friday last week, when my best friend sent me the invitation for his wedding he started in Photoshop. He wanted to run it through me before he uploaded it to his VPS and simply linked it to Google Maps.
The letters spelling the name of his future wife weren't well spaced (the kerning was off and it read MONSER RAT), I told him to adjust it but he didn't know how to do it, so he send me the PSD. Then I gave it to Claude and asked it to create a website based on the invitation. Then I bought a cute domain and told Claude to deploy it to Netlify. From the moment my friend had sent the PSD to the time I had a working website, barely 45 minutes had passed. Amazing!
My best friend used to say that he would get married dressed as a luchador, and that they would arrive to their wedding dressed as luchadores. I always thought it would be super cool to have a lucha libre themed wedding, even though he wouldn't follow up: my friend is extravagant in thought but conventional in practice. I wanted to honor his desire with an alternative website, so I bought a second domain vamosalcasorio.com and asked Claude to use the same information as a template, then I prompted ChatGPT to create an image of the scenario, and it took us about 15 minutes to produce a very nice looking alternate version of the wedding website.
I always balk when friends ask me for favors related to my employment. I don't want to use my free time working more on the computer: ask me to move your furniture, to attend a boring event with you, to intercede in an uncomfortable situation, but don't ask me to sit down and work more. People tend to like what I do, but I take ages doing it. With AI this was no longer the case, it was a pleasure actually. It removes all the boring stuff (and there's a lot in web development) leaving the fun part in. Ok, it's still boring waiting for it to complete its tasks, but at the same time I console myself by thinking "yeah the alternative to waiting is to do it myself". My friend was thrilled with the results.
Yesterday I arrived and started working on my "Montreal" project, a standalone website to share with my family for the time I spent in Montreal taking care of my grandmother. I exported my entries from movable type and then asked claude to read the xml and import it into a new Astro project. Boom 15 minutes and it was done. I also exported all photos I had from Montreal and added prompts in the comments section of MacOS with instructions such as "Put this image in the entry where I say I went to the library and borrowed a book". It did a splendid job. I'm very glad to have been saved from the grunt work (I don't think I would have found the time until my retirement) while at the same time being glad that there was zero AI in the content of my project. I'm not against AI generated content, except when content is meant to be self-expression. It's like prompting for art rather than creating it.
I'm very glad that I have a tech job as this is happening, it would have been mostly lost on me if I was bumming around. It was lost on me as I was bumming around. As of late, as I'm browsing the front page of reddit and I'm quickly annoyed, I think "rather than being pushed pitiful ragebait or the endless complaining of redditors, I'd rather have a conversation with Claude or ChatGPT. At first I will stare at the screen like ten seconds, trying to recall something I wondered recently, and then ask. I will check what I asked as I was waiting for the train this morning:
Ah yes, tell me authors similar to Buckminster Fuller, the included some unfamiliar names. I searched for Lewis Mumford. Where Bucky Fuller was an optimist, Mumford was a realist. So many things to learn, so little time. We should squander none of it. We ought to own our attention instead of giving it away freely because we don't know what to do with it.