So I’m coming off a R&D sprint investigating how to integrate the newer AI tools into our toolkit, and it’s been an interesting ride. I’ve learned a bit about prompt writing (“prompt engineering?” I’ll get to that), a bit about Python, a bit about Ruby, and a bit about neural nets. Not bad for a developer from Frontendistan.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last few days playing around with AI-generated art. I have a few mostly unorganized thoughts I wanted to get down, so here you go.

We’ve been working on a project at work that is growing a fairly elaborate user interface heavily informed by desktop applications like Photoshop. What used to be straightforward divs now need to be moved around, closed, minimized, and resized.

I’ve been using Copilot for a few weeks and have thoughts. It’s been helpful in small places, unhelpful in larger ones, and sometimes in the way. In fact, as I write this blog post it is in the way quite a lot.

“Thud factor” is academic slang for how loud your thesis sounds when it’s thrown downstairs. When I first registered this domain in (let me check…) August of 2000 (‼️) my intent was to fill up the site with a whole bunch of text. I did actually do that once upon a time, but one thing I never really got right was the typography.