Learning About AI

AI is the latest tectonic change in the software industry. It makes me think about the future of my work.

Reflection

Reflecting on the last 20 years in the software development business, I have observed a series of significant changes:

1. The single-page spaghetti coding style introduced by PHP allows for executing database manipulation and business logic in the middle of rendering a webpage. Database-driven web app with fast develop-to-release cycle becomes a reality.
2. The MVC framework, promoted by Ruby on Rails, encourages the separation of data models, business concerns, and presentation layers.
3. The overwhelming popularity of jQuery allows quick and dirty interactive interface design.
4. The rise of UX and UI design, making people focus more on the frontend and users’ actual interactions with products. More empathy and less emphasis on coding.
5. The introduction of the first iPhone (I miss that emotional moment when watching Steve Jobs’ keynote revealing the iPhone).
6. Running custom apps on a jailbroken phone. A few years later, Apple officially announced the App Store and SDKs. I seriously considered jumping to the Obj-C camp but later decided to stick to the web.
7. The Cappuccino framework: a re-implementation of Cocoa in Objective-J. I thought, “Wow, this might be it!” Still, I was not motivated enough to wrap my head around Obj-C or Obj-J.
8. AngularJS, which looked like magic. Suddenly I could build something that looked like a Google product!
9. NodeJS, which allowed me to develop both the backend and frontend with the same Javascript language. It started with just callbacks, and you could easily drown in the callbacks of hell. Promises slowly gained traction, and when async/await got to the core engine, building and maintaining large-scale NodeJS apps became more manageable.
10. VueJS and ReactJS, which are the successors of AngularJS. As of 2023, ReactJS seems to be the market leader in frontend development, at least in North America.

The Rise of Affordable and Accessible AI

Let’s take a look at 2023. The development of AI has captured the attention and imagination of hundreds of millions of people. Many individuals are exploring ideas on how to use these tools, and companies are already integrating AI into their existing or new products. The results are magical.

Here are a few scenarios that I have tested:

• Creating an AI teacher who can explain everything a 6-year-old child asks
• Refactoring some of my code or changing to a different programming language
• Having it summarize books and articles, which it performs well even when the original article is not in English
• Automatically generating blog post tags from a Chinese article.

I am still in the very early stages of learning about LLM and AI applications in general. Now that a clear goal is set, I can continue and embark on this new journey of learning and using AI.