This week I’ve been ticking things off my To-Do list quicker because I’ve been continuing to make use of AI (via the Cursor app). That has included several things for work which would have involved hours of code unpicking by hand and a fix for the site I’m playing with for my church music group, which had a problem transposing songs in minor keys and I was able to fix in about twenty minutes or less. It is rather magical and reminds me of some of the science fiction books I used to read and games I used to play.

However, it struck me that these tools are a bit like having a fast car. I could drive to the outskirts of Nottingham or Leicester in the time it would take me to walk to the middle of Loughborough and I could drive to the outskirts of London in less than the time it would take me to walk to those nearer cities. However, if I walked into a tree, I and the tree would probably survive relatively unharmed. If I drove into a tree at the same speeds I’d need to drive to make good those claims the picture would be less good!

Perhaps that would also be fair of how AI code development works – you can go at speeds that would be superpowered for a regular human but you need extra precautions to avoid ending up with a codebase that is a confused mess that even more AI can’t penetrate. Things like using Git for version control (exposing what has been changed and allowing dead ends to be rolled back) and understanding what the system is proposing before unleashing it help add the level of safety you need for travelling at that speed.

While on the car metaphor, it is probably also worth observing that we still haven’t got to the point where computer controlled vehicles look like becoming a significant presence on our roads despite massive investment and many very smart people working on it. That suggests some problems still to be solved and that we haven’t reached the point where AI tools are entirely magical!