Swisscom MyAI as tutor
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Yesterday I asked MyAI by Swisscom, which is still in Beta, if it could help me write a JavaScript app to generate passwords and it did, with ease. It provided me with the javascript code I needed so I could cut and paste it, and then use node to run it straight from terminal.
People often think that AI will replace us, and if certain companies in the US have their way, then it will. On the flipside I believe that AI will replace Googling for snippets of code that help us reach our coding goals.
Google Fu and AI
In many podcasts that I listened to over the years about JavaScript, Ruby On Rails and others I often heard the term Google Fu. It's the concept that people know what they want to do but they use Google to find and help write functions that help them achieve what they want.
In some cases it would take hours to find useful help when stuck on a problem. That's where skill and experience in searching for useful answers came in.
With AI, even with MyAI which is still in Beta, you can save hours of searching and trial and error. When I asked MyAI to write the app it provided me with code, which I could read and understand, and check for anomalies. Through studying a number of JavaScript courses I understand what the code is doing.
Tutoring
AI works as a tutor, where we can ask it to help us achieve what we want, and we can cut and paste things but we can also elaborate.
Eventually I asked about the limitations of this code, and whether I should use bcrypt or something similar so it added that in. It also added password hashing.
It provided me with three suggestions of how to use it, whether in the command line, via a web page or one or two other uses. In the end this took half an hour to an hour to do.
More than a Function at a Time
When I first started experimenting with AI I asked it to create one function at a time. Now I see that we can ask it to write an entire app, and tweak it through an iterative process to get it to do what we want it to do. AI can help save time.
Existing Libraries
While we can get AI to help us write a password generator we have the option of finding the right package. With Node generate-password is an existing tool that does the same thing. Whilst it's good to know how AI can help build apps from scratch it makes sense to see if an app already exists that can do what we want it to.
And Finally
Although US based AI models hog the limelight there are European solutions that offer some of the same assistance, without having to leave Swiss or European servers. We should not automatically go for ChatGPT, Claude and other solutions. Le Chat and MyAI provide good alternatives. We don't need to default to US based projects.
