Beyond that, it's a force multiplier and it doesn't care if the force is positive or negative. Someone with poor software engineering principals can use AI to make an absolute mess quickly.
The difference between "art in general" and this is scale and speed. Sure, I'll grant you that people are going to engage in deception with or without this but the barrier to entry with this is literally on the floor. Do you have a $5 prepaid VISA? You can generate whatever narrative you want in 30 seconds. Replace the $5 Prepaid VISA with the pocketbook of a three letter agency and it starts getting crazy.
I know this is kind of at odds with this thread in general but
> but I know it requires work (...) to finish it
If you're like me and, when you get to this stage, you tend to burn out and abandon the thing, have you tried using gen AI to get you over that hump?
I love coding and still do but I often reached a point where all the fun, easy things were done and I'd be stuck at 90% with only difficult and boring tasks. I've been using Claude recently to just get me over that hump and finish my projects. It can still be fulfilling if you do it right.
I think the point is that I don't have to remember the command. I just have to tell my agent in plain-English to do X.
For example, we're dragging our feet on Github Config as Terraform at our org so in the meantime I've been using Claude + the gh cli to deploy changes across repos. I don't need to know / remember the gh cli command to pull or push a ruleset, or script a loop in Bash, I just have to say
> Claude pull the ruleset from <known good repo> and push it to <repo 1>, <repo 2>, <repo 3>
The CLI is also nice because it abstracts away authentication. I have another flow which doesn't have a CLI and Claude is more than happy to interpolate the API key that it read from a config file into the chat history (horrifying).
Exactly. Talking in plain English is a lot less mental overhead than reading the man page and figuring out the right command. Nowadays I just use AI instead of remembering ffmpeg commands too. Your point about authentication is important too.
That's what the coding agent does if you ask it to record a skill. Yes I can do that manually. But I'll get it wrong a few times before I get it right and waste half an hour in the documentation, if I'm lucky.
Or I just go, "I just created this cloudflare domain. Deploy the site via gh actions to cloudlare pages whenever I push to main. here are my credentials; put them in Github secrets." Or something similarly high level.
The clever thing here is not doing things manually but make sure you generate automation and scripts if you are going to do the same things more often along with skill files detailing how and when to call shit.
You could introduce teleportation boots to humanity and within a few weeks we'd be complaining that sometimes we still have to walk the last 20 meters.
Beyond that, it's a force multiplier and it doesn't care if the force is positive or negative. Someone with poor software engineering principals can use AI to make an absolute mess quickly.
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