Personal Software > Personal Computers
Today I gave my wife about three weeks of time back, all thanks to AI.
Earlier today I spent about 3 hours working on a simple Chrome Extension for my wife's business. I reckon it'll save her at least 2 hours PER WEEK. Over the course of a year, that's over a hundred hours of time saved on a super important, but rather repetitive task.
We're not going to publish it to the Google store; it'll live and die on our machines.
Developers have always been able to do things like this by making small tools that automate some manual tasks. The latest AI models let everybody have a go. You can literally just describe the thing you want to do and your computer can build you bespoke software.
Now, this isn't a magic potion. There's still a learning curve - and you need to describe what you actually want. You need to be able to explain that to the computer.
It's not just writing the software that's 10x simpler. Thanks to AI, the software itself is also 10x more useful. When folks normally write software, particularly for these small automations, the inputs and outputs usually need to be neatly structured. Every edge case had to be (literally) hardcoded, or the automation just breaks down. (From experience) You can spend more time troubleshooting why something broke than actually fixing the thing.
Embedding AI into the software, though, we can now have inputs and outputs that are a little 'fuzzy', which makes things so much more useful in real life. Instead of breaking when your data isn't perfectly formatted or there's an unexpected step in a process, AI models can adapt and react.
My little Chrome extension is a tiny example of what I think we'll see a lot more of.
I can't wait to see what I build next.