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Here's a bit of a 🧵 with this one user's experience trying to get a little smidge of productivity out of generative AI coding. TLDR: it's taken three years, but (one of) the bots has finally accomplished a simple task for me, so chalk one up for AI.

But I also try to make sure my skepticism doesn't blind me to actual real-world advances — not benchmark BS but everyday accomplishments — and here is one.

I always wanted a local archive of the 600+ articles I wrote for Axios during my seven or so years working there. Axios' site has a nice author page but it's chunked into 5-stories-at-a-time and the prospect of manually copying those files always daunted me.

When people started claiming that AI was writing decent code in 2023, I began asking chatGPT and later Claude and other tools to do this job for me. The tools failed miserably for a long time.