Unless you have been living under a rock over the last couple of years you have probably run into something that’s been touched by generative AI. These tools are interesting in concept and they aren’t going to be going away any time soon but I’m definitely getting sick of the people who are taking these tools and using them like their existence makes them a domain expert in something that they have no business messing with.
Some of these tools are able to do some crazy stuff, and the people that I’m seeing using these tools and getting success with them are all folks that already know what they are doing in a specific domain. So a developer who writes code can definitely take these things and use them to generate code quicker, sanity check their work for security issues or common bugs, or even layout UI elements for quick prototyping.
Now take that same tool and put it into the hands of someone who doesn’t have that same background and now you have someone who’s building a application but doesn’t have the background to understand what’s getting produced by the tool. Sure you might be able to get a app working but without knowing how it’s working do you know if your inputs are all being validated to make sure that you don’t have security issues with someone tying to inject SQL commands into the application. Do you know how your database is configured and how the data that it contains is being protected?
And while these are all things that I’m sure the the AI tool can address if you don’t have a background in application development and you don’t know that input validation can cause problems how will you know to address that problem in the first place?
I’m not an application developer myself, but I do write a number of scripts for application deployments and configuration of systems, and I’ve played with using these tools to build some of those scripts. Starting with ones that I have already built that are working properly to see what the AI tool would come up with when prompted.
Generally I’m not hugely impressed.
This might be just me not knowing how to prompt the things to do what I want but in general the results from the AI tools don’t work any better than my scripts and in most cases take longer to build out since I have to keep going back and telling the tool what I want it to do and iterate over and over with them to get things working properly.
Where I do see better results is when I take an existing script that’s working and tell it to clean up my syntax and check for typos. Even then the results so far haven’t run better or faster than what I do normally, occasionally a loop is a few lines shorter but in the scripts that I’m working with those few extra lines don’t make a difference in the long run.
At this point I have been hearing stories about people building app without any experience and starting businesses based on these apps. I haven’t actually seen anybody do this successfully where they didn’t already have the ability to do so without the AI tools. Even playing around with some of the larger applications that claim to build apps like that I still don’t see them building things that are useful without spending a large amount of time telling the tool exactly what you want done. With the tool that I was playing with I was building a very basic app to try to replace a excel sheet that was used to track device inventory and it was so tedious that I just gave up after having to tell the AI Agent that we not only needed a way to check out a device but that we would need a way to check the device back in. Something that any competent developer that I have ever worked with would have built from the start.
At some point these tools will likely get to where the advertisements are trying to make us believe that they are at, but It’s still feeling like a ways off.