This episode of Horizon from 1978 is an interesting historical look at microprocessors and how they were starting to filter through into the world at large. As a piece of its time, it’s an interesting documentary all by itself, but I was intrigued/amused at the back half, which was all about how white and blue-collar jobs will be eliminated by our 6502 overlords, showing examples of a doctor creating an expert system that would replace consultants, and a building contractor who only had to tell a system how to do something once and then a robot would be able to perfectly replicate the process. Again, 1978. It’s interesting how we now seem to be in the same position, only this time…maybe it’s more real? Or are we getting ahead of ourselves once more, and the advent of Claude/etc. just means a new normal, like how coding in C or Pascal is often much faster than trying to write assembler.

I find I can do more; this weekend, I trained a new model for work, yes, but I did two other things that I could have done myself, but it would have taken weeks and weeks of effort. Firstly, I finally started setting up the smart solar bird feeder I bought during a recent sale. But it wasn’t the brand I somehow assumed it was, and the only way to communicate with it is to use an iOS or Android app, and they want an extra $20/year for sharing the account. I sat down with Claude just after 13:00 on Saturday, and by 15:00, we had mapped out the entire API, pulled out a long-lived JWT token that allows me to authenticate whenever and where-ever, and built a small web server that produces a child-friendly set of HTML cards ready to show Maeryn just what birds have visited today, and hooking up the audio to BirdNET so it’s strictly speaking better AI than what the company is offering through the app alone.

Then, for a laugh on Sunday afternoon, I pointed Claude at the source code for Grid Wars. Every so often, I remember how fun that game was and then I rediscover that the Intel builds currently crash on MacOS. I told Claude to port it to a Rust WASM runtime that could be played in the browser. And damn if it didn’t just go ahead and do it. It required a little hand-holding to get the blur and gravity mesh effects just right…but I can now just play Grid Wars by serving up just a few files on a website¹. It is very strange having all these horizons just open up in front of you. And it is something of a siren call; just one more idea that you can run before bedtime, just one more run and you’ll be fixed. I feel like I have stepped away from the edge a couple of times already, but every Friday night, the AI abyss comes around again…

(Next week? Back to the 1980s)