Many of my friends know me as the eternal luddite, the non-stop
shitter on new things, the ultimate if it ain’t broke guy…you get
the picture.

So of course a few years ago when generative AI hit the scene, I
didn’t think much of it. Afterall, I’m an elder millenial and it
didn’t really seem like anything in my life would be improved by
using a stupid AI tool that generated college term papers and crappy
clip-art.

Plus i’m the ultimate cheapskate and I’ll be damned if I’m paying
a fee for AI much less try to purchase a decent GPU and run a model
on my own hardware.

But as is the case for most revolutionary technologies, one day it
just kind of appears in your life. Since I work for a large Fortune
500 company, we of course have an enterprise subscription to
Microsoft 365. And with that subscription comes Microsoft co-pilot,
which is Microsoft’s production LLM AI tool.

And let’s not kid ourselves here. Microsoft is pushing this AI tool
like crazy. It is literally the 3rd icon under your email and
calendar icon in Microsoft’s office.com cloud suite.

So anyways, one day I decide to actually use the darn thing…I know
I know, actually trying an LLM for the first time in 2025?!? hey
I told you i’m a luddite alright.

At first I was doing the silly stuff like asking it to generate
dumb clip art and looking up words and concepts that I was too lazy
to go to wikipedia for.

But then I actually asked it to generate some computer code to
compare it to some perl/shell scripts I had written.

I have to say that I am actually blown away. Yes obviously, LLMs
aren’t going to be writing million line applications or operating
systems (yet?!?) but in terms of everyday scripting and small
programs to get things done? I am genuinely shocked how useful LLMs
already are.

I spent my 20s in my first job coding CGI scripts, shell scripts,
and data analysis programs for my industry vertical. I mean that
is literally what I did every single day at work in the early 2000s.
I would sit in meetings with end-users and document whatever crazy
webpage, spreadsheet, or data viz that they wanted and write the
Perl/shell/C/fortran code to do it.

These programs obviously aren’t giant GUI applications with gobs
of OO code. Just backend server code mostly along with some industry
specific scientific code.

Needless to say, I am actually completely shocked about how good
AI coding actually is. I am completely convinced that the code
output that comes from the AI is generally as good as anything I
was producing in my 20s. What a bitter pill to swallow, truly.

If you already have programming experience, then AI will supercharge
your skill…truly. Since I’m an elder millennial, my coding experience
is generally Perl, C, and Fortran. No one can convince me that
anything is better and more flexible than Perl…it’s my ride-or-die
language.

However, this is where AI can come into play. I can now essentially
program ANY language that the AI knows about. Just ask the AI to
translate your perl code or write out a prototype in perl with
functional stubs and ask AI to fill in the functions.

It is actually insane how effective this is if you already know
how to mentally structure a program. I almost have no words. I am
literally gobsmacked. I haven’t programmed for a living in more
than a decade but I really just can’t imagine how amazing this
would be for a full-time software engineer.

Like I remember struggling to update an old .net/C# program early
in my career just because I didn’t know the language. I had to go
to stack-overflow constantly and google my way through C# syntax
and idioms. But nowadays, i can just ask AI to do it.

My little use cases above are literally just the surface of what
AI can do. I mean these are the lowest of the low hanging fruit
and it would already make me twice as productive. I am in no way
a 10x software engineer. I don’t work at a FAANG company and I’m
as far away from the bleeding edge as possible. Yet even so, I can
see that AI will completely supercharge the average engineer/programmer
in doing the most boring and most mundane software coding tasks
that a normal non-tech company will ask of them.

Take it from an avowed luddite…gen AI will genuinely change the
world in the same way that personal computers, cell phones, and
the Internet did. I don’t say this lightly, but the hype for AI is
real for a lot of real-life use cases. Be prepared.