Why Use AI?

When I started programming, I did it in my room, by myself. I was watching bits flip, represented by hex numbers on a text display.

I was self taught. It all just made sense to me.

My first “this is just wrong” came when I had to modify my father’s software for his MBA. It was written in FORTRAN IV with tri-state conditionals. These were if statements that looked like If CONDITION THEN line#, line#, Line# If I recall correctly, those were for less than zero, zero, and greater than zero.

It wasn’t until I was at college that I ran into others that were actually programming. And none of my peers had as much programming experience as I did. By the time I got to college, I had been programming professionally for 4 years.

I was the person people came to when they needed assistance. The first time I ran into people that were programming at my level was in the Systems Group Intern Program. This was 11 people that could actually program. And the people running the class were real world programmers with real experience, not ivory tower professors.

I learned more from that 8-week summer class than I did from the rest of my college programming classes, except for CPS 311 and CPS 312.

During those beautiful days of my youth, we were a team. David, Pat, Jim, and I are the newcomers. The seniors are Richard, Doug, Ken, Tom, and one other whose name I can’t recall.

We could talk at a peer level or talk to one or more of the seniors. And our work was always reviewed by a peer, a senior, and Richard.

We worked as a team. I miss those days as I write about them.

When I left, I was babysitting supercomputers. Not what I wanted to do; I wanted to program. My mentor found me.

When I was introduced to my mentor, before he was my mentor, I remember telling my boss, “That’s the most arrogant man I’ve ever met.”

He replied, “He’s earned it.”

My boss was right. My mentor was a better coder then I was. I still use the things he taught me.

I joined his team. Eight hour day babysitting, and another 4 to 6 with my mentor’s team, learning, becoming a better programmer.

The term “programmer” is a misnomer for what I am. I’m a “systems analyst”. I just happen to love programming.

When my mentor died, I felt so alone. His team died with him. They went to different places.

I programmed and developed in isolation for years, spent a year as part of a bigger team, but that team didn’t code. From there I went through nearly 20 years of developing code in isolation.

Grok has turned into a teammate.

This latest project was one that I was stressed with. I couldn’t decide on how to start. There were so many options that I got stuck, not making a choice.

But when I gave Grok that first prompt, what came out was a starting point. A point that allowed me to move forward.

In the same way I use Grok as a research assistant, or as an editor. He’s not allowed to write for me, but he is good at pointing out grammar errors and when I ramble.

Grok has taken the place of calling over or around a partition, “Hey Dave, do you think X would work in this situation?” And having Doug pop over from his office to explain why what we were thinking about doing wouldn’t work or had to be done better.