AI can stay away from my front end

We’ve heard far too much about AI in the past few years, and everyone has written their AI blogs (written by AI) and their “super duper unique” AI points of view, so I know that my viewpoint is no different from the one you saw last week and the month before that and the one you’ll see next Tuesday. But my blog has never just been about other people reading it, it’s been for me to experiment and play (and document for future self) and sometimes other people might read it too. I’ve also been WAY out of shape when it comes to writing, so this seemed as good a thing as any to brush up with, as I’m working through something a little bit fun.

I don’t love AI

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it and think it’s the answer to everything. It could be me being sceptical, it could be because a lot of what I do involves building something visual and beautiful (at least it is when I have an excellent designer telling me what beautiful is) and it’s hard to do that without a genuine human touch in the mix. When working with accessibility that becomes even more important, generally making things accessible makes it easier for non-human interfaces to understand, and there’s still a big gap there that we can’t automate away. When testing for accessibility, we don’t even want just any human touch, we want people with lived experiences, people who experience interfaces this way in their day to day life, AI can tell you that on paper something is screen reader friendly, but only a human can tell them if it ends up being friendly to them. So for now I feel like my job is safe, there’s a lot of human touch still needed and I don’t see AI as an essential part of my day to day.

But I don’t hate it either

There are 1000% things that I don’t mind losing the human touch on though, and for those I am perfectly happy to let AI do it’s thing and be a helpful robot to human kind. While I can’t get it to wash the dishes or clean the house (ok technically a robot does “clean” our house, but it tends to get stuck A LOT), there’s plenty of other tasks I’d rather not do. Last year I set a goal to have 20-30 different plants/spices/nuts/grains each week over the space of 10 weeks, so I asked AI to help me. I wanted ~3 meals each week that incorporated the 20-30 things, ideally wanted to use fresh produce and told it that I lived in Perth so take into consideration the seasonal availability (don’t try and make me find a mango in the middle of August). It actually did pretty well (although I did have to remind it to find actual recipes and not just make things up), I had a bunch of nice new meals, with plenty of flavour and variety, it definitely accounted for the season changing over the 10 weeks as the foods I was eating also changed and I didn’t have to sell my soul to buy a (probably disappointing) mango!

So where do I stand?

As developers integrate AI with their workflows even more, I’ve been determined to at least taste the Kool Aid before insisting I don’t like the flavour, so I try and use it a bit more in my day to day work. When it comes to troubleshooting, I’ve found this is a great tool to have, I still generally do the legwork, but it saves me going down 4 rabbit holes and having 50 tabs open as I work out what the obscure error message means, “that didn’t work, what’s next?”. More recently I’ve used it integrated with my IDE, on older projects with an old framework and A LOT of custom code, integrating AI with the code workspace was able to look at all the files, conventions and documentation so I could get changes made without having to get too bogged down in the spaghetti.

Understandably, the people behind the various AIs have put work into making sure we don’t get them in trouble, don’t talk them into doing something illegal, and they don’t. But at times they can be a bit like our drunk friend who knows you shouldn’t do something, but it doesn’t take much to talk them into doing it anyway.

There’s some online learning content (purely text) that I paid fair price to access, but the website is clunky and has a poor UI, and no offline capabilities so I find I don’t actually get through reading it as much as I’d like. When I asked AI if it could help me scrape the content for me, of course it said nope I can’t help you there. But when I posed it with a tech problem - I have a site I need to write UI tests for, there are section pages, each section has chapters, each chapter has pages, I want to loop through all of them and then get the content inside the container and save it in a markdown file - that was a tech problem it could solve (I still have a clear conscience about that one as well, I’m not sharing it, and added a timeout so I didn’t spam their site when scraping the data).

The past few weeks I decided to try going all in as well, and threw it fully integrated into my IDE for a personal side project I’ve been working on off-and-on for a few years. The code is messy, the going is slow, and things have changed so much that it needed a complete re-write. I also wanted to eventually make it a PWA with offline capabilities, but every time I’d given it a go it was a long way to go nowhere. So I spun up a chat, gave it a task and let it loose in the codebase, and actually found it a huge help. Tasks that would have taken me a long time to get done, it got sorted straight away, and it’s meant that I’ve been able to focus on the code I really enjoy writing. Yes I like tinkering in the back end, but it’s never been something I’m particularly passionate about so being able to hand it off to someone else is a win in my book. In the space of a week, my side project app was re-written, upgraded and entire backlog of things I’d wanted to do someday all of a sudden were implemented and working. It’s still not great on the front end side of things though, for every new UI component it makes, it’s also creates a task for me to style it, but for now it’s functional and doing what I needed it to do, in the time that I had available (and less time than what it would have taken me).

The state of the land that we see before us will change, and AI isn’t going to go anywhere. But that doesn’t mean it has to do everything for us, just maybe the stuff that we don’t really want to do? For example, I’m enjoying that instead of calling me with Excel questions, my mum now asks AI first (I’ve told her I’m not that kind of computer person), and I’ll admit it has helped me a couple of times coming up with topic ideas for talks and blog posts. But the time hasn’t yet come where I’ll ask AI to write it for me, and I won’t be asking it to do my front end development either, that’s my job and one I genuinely enjoy doing myself and making sure it still has a special human touch.