AI tools that perhaps aren’t evil or are they?
I wanted to write a short post about some tools I’ve come across recently in my day job. I’m a web developer and have worked in this field for many years. Two of the most common pieces of software I use are a Linux Terminal and a code editor, which for many years now has been Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. It’s brilliant, it’s extensible and compatible with Github - especially considering that Microsoft own Github of course.
Microsoft have been working hard on their co-pilot product, an AI tool that can help you solve coding problems, refactor code, identify issues and help you fix bugs.
I’ve come across something else, possibly better. In fact there are two.
https://cursor.com/ Cursor - The AI Code Editor
https://www.warp.dev/ Warp: The Agentic Development Environment
Both of these tools are insanely good. I never thought I’d be saying that about any of this stuff.
Cursor is a fork of visual studio code and makes use of some different large language models, in fact I believe that they’re developing their own propriety models based on a mix of popular data. It gets to know your codebase and prompt history. Makes very timely suggestions as you write code and guesses your next steps. Getting it right most of the time. It’s uncanny. Is this what they call “vibe CB coding”?
Where cursor is contained within the coding environment, Warp operates from its own terminal app. You can run standard Linux commands but you can also ask it questions such as:
“Search my codebase for all flag images, list by ISO code and I want to check that we’ve covered all of the countries in the APAC region”
It’s response to this will be thorough and detailed. It would find out what APAC is, the countries this region encompasses and then show a table mapping these to the SVG files we’ve got and those we’re missing.
Heck, it would even generate the SVGs for you.
A colleague who also tried it described it as being like having your own junior developer, whom you can delegate work to.
Should at all feel threatened by AI though? The answer isn’t simple, the tools can help you achieve ten times as much each day but will there come a time, when all of this could be automated? It can be now - when will our jobs become obsolete?
Cursor is for sure made by the devil lol, just kidding. But I think that we will become lazier than we are just now.
That’s the worry but recently we all got together as a team and one of the senior managers asked us who uses AI and the hands all went up slowly around the table. He was grinning and said, that’s totally cool, we have to move with the times and tools that boost productivity are a good thing.
I'm loving AI as a tool, but I do think some serious shit is gonna change the world as we know it. However, we have thought that about tech a million times before, right? The fear is we are going to seriously LOSE some skills.
That’s the rub isn’t it? Creative skills, coding skills, writing, film making etc will be cheaper to get AI to do. Pushing people out of their careers they’ve invested lifetimes in.
True, tech has freaked us out before, computers were a curse once and now a tool that we all use. I’ve always been into them but other people I know who wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole are now very adept with them.
Who knows where this will lead. I’m getting involved like I did last time as that seems the best course of action, especially at this point in my career where young folk might snap up the jobs more easily than us fifty somethings.
Yeah definitely have to keep in the loop. I can definitely use and understand it more than 95 percent of Gen Xers I know that's for sure.
There will be a lot of people who don’t get it and as such won’t give it a try.
I think the biggest concern with the use of AI is the fear that they will make us dependent on their use.
Currently most school children with access to a phone don't see the need to study simple tasks because they have the option of using an AI.
Exactly! Companies will have access to team AI tooling and could make decisions on pay reviews based on the number of prompts you are making, if you solely use AI, they might let you go - ultimately we will not be able to work anymore, companies can reduce staff and use AI to replace people.