I've always wanted to start project and properly finish it. Thanks to Golang and a heck ton of conversations with ChatGPT, I managed to make it happen. No more dead projects in the water, no more stranded code without an end in sight.
So what is it? What have my grubby little fingers created by hammering these poor blue switches for over 3 months in my spare time? A tarot reader that is. Just a boring tarot reader. Yes, yes, it is done with "AI". Yes, it is done with GPT-3.5. Yes, yes, it is probably worse than those chatbot wrappers you get off Play Store that scams with a hefty annual subscription if you forget to cancel the free trial. You go the site, you "talk" via a text form to an entity that tells you ambiguous futures and whatnots about what's on your mind.
It is pretty much a Golang chatbot that is prompted to talk like a tarot reader. I generated the tarot card set with Dall-E. Link it up with some basic Postgres tables to store conversation, put it behind Caddy+Tailscale Funnel to serve HTTPS traffic and that is pretty much all. Unimpressive, I know.
Because I can. But really, it is because I never "knew" front end development. In this age of Bootstrap, AngularJS, Tailwind, and whatever is going on with front end development, it has always felt that I am served the same thing but on different plates. This project has allowed me to go in depth on how many things came together. CSS styles, the Javascript DOM model, HTML divs, etc. Never had I spent so much time reading MDN and realized the wealth of knowledge that is available on it.
This project is not "creative". If you are against OpenAI, then this project is "useless" too. But it was not useless to me. The "democratization" of LLMs gave me the push forward to places I have not been before. LLMs was the teacher that I never had, and the assistant that could do "that one thing" that you never really understand.
What about the poor artists I have ripped off? What about the treasure trove of knowledge that these LLMs were trained on that contains a ton of copyrights and IPs? Should I have stopped to wonder to wonder whether I should, before wondering whether I could? Is this code legitimately "mine"? I do not have the answers. But without the push from LLMs, the barrier of entry to the ever-changing landscape of tech has never been so accessible.
“but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?”
- Terry Pratchett, Snuff