Too Many Ideas, Not Enough Skill
I’ve always had way more ideas than I can actually build. I’ll get excited about something, start working on it, hit some technical problem I can’t solve, and then it just sits there. I didn’t have the money to hire developers and I’m too stubborn to give up control of a project, so most things ended up abandoned. On the plus side, failing at loads of different things has made me a decent generalist. I know a bit of everything. Just not always enough to finish what I started.
GPT-4 Changed Everything
I’d been messing around with AI for about a year, mostly doing generative art, when OpenAI dropped GPT-4. It’s basically like having a junior developer on call who never gets annoyed when you ask stupid questions. I can describe what I want in my own weird way and it just gets it. If I’m stuck I’ll literally ask it to explain something like I’m 12 and it does.
I started using it for simple websites and then kept going. CSS that used to take me ages of googling was done in minutes. I found I could feed it documentation from APIs it shouldn’t know about (2021 knowledge cutoff and all that) and it’d just learn on the spot. That’s how I ended up building chatbots with tools GPT-4 had never seen before.
Stuff I Actually Finished
This is the big thing. Projects that would normally take me weeks were getting done in a single evening. The FuseBox chatbot, some Google Doc extensions, a GPT-powered game in Unity, a Python tool that turns kids’ drawings into regency era paintings. All done. Not “I’ll get back to it eventually” done, properly done.
When you hit an error you just paste it in and GPT-4 tells you what’s wrong. That alone has saved me hundreds of hours.
The Weird Bit
So if GPT-4 can do most of what I’ve spent years learning to do, what does that make me? I used to watch artists complaining about AI image generators and thought I got it. Now it’s happening to my thing and yeah, I actually get it now.
I don’t really have an answer. I think someone still needs to have the ideas and know which ones are worth building. But it does make you think.
Right now I’m just using it as much as I can. I’ve shipped more stuff since March than in the previous two years, so I’ll take that.