A really long time ago, I went ahead and got my first “real” job. It wasn’t the ‘after-school supermarket gig’, it wasn’t even the ‘during uni faffing around with data-entry gig’. It was a real job in a real office. A friend of mine (who I met while thinking I could do Computer Science at university – spoiler alert, I didn’t complete that degree) had said that they needed more hands on deck at a small web design company.
I fancied myself a ‘not-bad’ coder. So I rocked on up, in what I felt was a suitably fashionable hoodie and got to work. As the smallest cog in a fairly small machine, I was in charge of creating buttons and small links to more important parts of the site. The most exciting thing I got to do was watch, while senior developers worked on a new download functionality for music – years before ‘streaming music’ was a thing.
I loved it. I learnt how classic ASP worked (or didn’t), and then learnt to wrangle Microsoft Visual Studio, when my previous coding experience was in Notepad++ (the dates might be a bit muddled, the internet tells me that Notepad++ has only been available from 2003, this might have been around then, but in my head, I could swear it was earlier!)
I also learnt what happens when something is deployed to production and hadn’t been tested properly. Luckily, it wasn’t me, but I did witness the entire production site going down one day (late in the afternoon, of course) and the panic of the senior developers as they tried to undo the mess.
Why am I taking you down memory lane?
Well, I spotted this article today in Stuff (screenshot here, and link to the PDF version at the bottom, in case it goes down)
To save you having to read the whole thing, the story outlines the case of a website that an ‘Auckland convenience store’ created using a tool called Base44. Base44 is one of the latest fashionable ‘vibe-coding platforms for building apps and websites’ (according to its own marketing) – which in turn, is the latest lingo for “do something quite technical, with zero technical knowledge”.
As the internet likes to do, in the 2-hour window the site was left unattended, people had put up such gems for sale; the screenshot above promises a single banana priced at $850 as well as a mouldy school lunch priced at $5.50.
It all reminds me of this awesome XKCD comic. Which I must confess, I’ve probably used before:
Again, what does any of this have to do with my anecdote above.
Well, we are smack bang in the age of AI, and particularly genAI – or generative artificial intelligence. The idea being that we can outsource our own human thought and work to machines. Machines that are made up of an entire digital infrastructure that we do not understand or know about.
This XKCD comic was created on the 17th of August 2020. ChatGPT (one of the first cabs off the rank) launched officially in 2023. This depiction of the mysteriousness of all modern digital infrastructure was before the black boxes that are AI Machine Learning Algorithms, yet is is more true now than it has ever been.
I’m the first one to admit that I use generative AI myself from time to time. But, I feel that I use it, roughly knowing what I will get out. (I mostly use it to sharpen content that I have written first – not this piece though, this piece was all me!)
BUT, and this is crucial, it comes after almost two decades of writing my own content, and honing my own voice.
Had the ‘Auckland convenience store’ also come from decades of working on websites, they would have known to check things like who has posting permissions, how do you set up a cloud service to be secure, and how do you ensure that only the people who are meant to have access has access. Or failing that, they could have paid a small web design company – much like the one I started my career off in, to do those checks.
But at the convenience of saving a few dollars, they left themselves up for ridicule and silliness.
The web design job fell over in a few months. Unfortunately an unscrupulous client that the owner was pinning all their hopes and dreams on didn’t pay and it caused a series of unfortunate business consequences. To the credit of the owner, they paid out their contractors, even the smallest cog like me.
That job led me to try to do the web design thing for a few years, but because of largely the same reasons as encapsulated above, I tend to steer away from it all now. It has gotten too complicated for me to keep my head in the game, and I don’t want or need that kind of pressure.
I’m not entirely sure what my aim was in writing all this. I guess I was due a rambly long blog that no one will read. Just that, as the parent of a teen and a young adult, I despair of a world that is full of sycophantic robots that lead all of us to think we can do amazing things, and then do them badly.
Because we are a world of over 8 billion people. We can do amazing things, in amazing ways. We don’t need a robot to tell us that, and we certainly have to try and fail ourselves, and learn from those mistakes.
A robot told this convenience store owner that they could make a website. So they did.
All that owner has learnt is to not trust the robot to make a website. Had this been 2005, that owner might have first learnt how to make a website, badly. Then they would have fixed it, bit by bit, until it was the website they wanted. Even if it wasn’t as pretty as they want it to be, and being 2005, it would have been up for about 2 years after the convenience store had shut down, and maybe, just maybe, that owner would have gone onto a tech job, deciding that learning how to code was much more fun and rewarding than selling Coca Cola and pies, maybe.