I can see how it is addictive: I feel super smart and powerful, I get lured in with free samples then everything costs, it grabs my attention when I am tripping, and when I am not tripping I am thinking about it all the time.
Generative AI is a new drug.
So I dove in with my $20/month Claude Code subscription and started making pretty great progress in an hour or so. It came up with a plan and started to execute it, we swerved, changed, debugged. But I soon ran out of tokens and I needed to pay for more, this time to $100/month– ok, lets try it. Point 1: first bit is free, then the cost escalates.
It flattered me at every step– “Good idea” “That will make a much better UX experience” etc. I was super good at this, apparently. It said so. All the time.
For 3 years, I have used it for one-shot help on spreadsheet formulas, command lines, helpful research, occasional entertaining poems or pictures. But yesterday I thought I would take out Claude code to see if I could prototype a project I have been dreaming of: a simple downloadable self-hosted web server that could be used without any of the hassles and costs of domain name registration, https certificate registration, hosting costs. A web server for the decentralized world. It is a project that would take a full time person maybe a year to get right and propagated, and that person is hard to find, and expensive. Someone called the project “Onion Press.” Could I vibe code it?
I am an outdated computer programmer, but it knew how to configure all the newest packages, knew how to take suggestions really well and iterated and fixed its own bugs and all. It was like having a very speedy (very) programming assistant right there, always smiling. I was super powerful again– I could make my dreams come true. I even asked chatGPT for a logo for the project with a brief description, and it worked making a nifty logo and related icons.
After my day binge yesterday, I have been thinking of improvements all day. I can not wait to get back to the keyboard and have another dose. It all seems too good to be true.
Then it occurred to me: Generative AI is a New Drug. And it doesn’t spill. Yet.