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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.

I have largely been a gen-AI skeptic since ChatGPT's advent. We're always two years off from AGI or recursive self-improvement or superintelligence singularity, no matter when you start. It's like the whole industry closed its eyes and adopted the ludicrous Musk promise horizon.

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.

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.

They did keep getting better but there were always roadblocks. Recently it became clear that just writing code to crawl the Axios site and get the files was within reach. But doing so would still require me to set up a development environment, manage the code, run the debugging process, etc.

I could do that with effort. But the whole point here was to eliminate effort! If this was going to be a time-saver, AI would have to do more of the grunt-work itself.