It’s quite funny thinking how far things have come in 231 days – in terms of AI and my own progress.
I started this process off with a desire to use some runway that I had in order to build something for myself. Some sort of system which I had a vague idea of what it was going to do.
In the 200~ days I have worked a couple of months freelance to bring in some cash, had another couple of months during the summer off to deal with some personal issues, taken my health habits to a new level which has resulted in a much higher level of vitality, energy and drive; and I’ve also helped a local company resurrect their platform resulting in having a very solid base of an AI platform now.
The Future Of Software
Ultimately, as I’ve said many times now on this blog… I think software is going to radically change. Voice and gesture activation, Facebook glasses, etc all change the game in terms of user interface … as well as MCP servers changing how applications can interact with each other (with security caveats!) … add automation ‘flowgramming’ tools to that and suddenly we’ve got businesses that will have processes effectively running in the background with only minor oversight. Or to put it another way, businesses will have a fully automated schematic process flow which will prompt humans for input and then carry on. Any company that doesn’t add this digital backbone to their business will not take advantage of the cost (time/money/energy) savings that this will enable. It will require, however, upfront consideration of how the business works, and for that – people will need to think!
How AI Has Stopped People Thinking
This is a really serious topic and is fundamentally taking us into the age of stupid. Children can’t write properly anymore because they do all their typing on laptops. I’m shocked by how poor adult handwriting is anyway, to the point where my standard handwriting is considered ‘beautiful’ and I have many compliments on it. Now, children can barely think through answers to questions … instead they just google it, and now, they just ask ChatGPT!
I’ve only really been using ChatGPT Plus so far, I haven’t used Grok yet, or any of the other ones … but it has got really good. If you give it a great prompt to begin with to template the sort of levels of response you want, it can give some very, very good answers that mimic wisdom. I can clearly see how it is good for people to talk their problems through with AIs but I do worry about giving that sort of private data away to private corporations. Thankfully language models are available open source and we’re only a few years away from hardware evolving where many people can run LLMs locally.
Local platform
This year I was asked to look at a platform built on top of the Graphile framework. It’s a high end opinionated stack that works well for experienced javascript devs, but in the end the complexity and lack of support/documentation for such an obscure framework … meant that it was very difficult for developers to understand the system. Overall, I knew from the beginning that it was going to be an uphill task; we did TRY; but it ultimately failed. I was able to rebuild a better system that did the same thing within two months and that’s the AI platform that we are moving forward with now.
This week I finished a long sprint (scope creep lol!) that really got the system to a very solid working state. It currently allows the user to run and manage a website by curating content with AI from news sources, and also build layouts using AI. This may not sound very ground breaking and it isn’t from a limited perspective, but the infrastructure has been put in place for sending any items of data to AI workflows (with structured responses available) and then looking at the output. It’s back to the basics of Input-Process-Output.
This will eventually link with flowgramming tools like N8N and Zapier to take fuller advantage that those ecosystems offer.
Whilst I wasn’t entirely happy about replicating much of the functionality of WordPress, and subsequently having many thoughts that I should have just written a WordPress plugin, I think the Laravel infrastructure is a far better bet, and I will provide a WP integration at some point so posts and pages can be pumped to websites for people who don’t want to switch CMS’ (which is a very good decision in most cases).
Having deployed this latest iteration internally, I’m very happy with it. There’s a ton of things we can now put on the roadmap and deploy very quickly. I’ve got a snag-list of quality of life improvements for the workflow, since it’s a bit clunky at the moment. Once those are done we’ve got some internal projects planned that will use the system – we want to use what we build not only as demos but as fully fledged side businesses/hustles to our main product. We’ve also got some demos planned to a couple of companies that have shown some interest. And we’ve got a secondary platform niche started up in the affiliate market.
This all sounds pretty good, but there’s lots of work ahead to continually refine the product to something that will suit the market. But at least we’re getting somewhere.
That’s it for today!
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