CODING IN THE AGE OF AI
I Just Got My Last Programming Income
It’s good that I don’t need it now
Earlier this week, I had a phone call from an old customer. He knows that I’m retired, but he had a problem with a script I wrote for him back in 2012. I don’t know why it took eleven years for this issue to be noticed, but when I looked at the script, I quickly saw where I neglected to test for certain input.
I told him that I could see the problem and could easily fix it, but that I’d like to introduce him to a new consultant who would work for free. I explained that I had already given the script to this generous coder, and that I got back a corrected script within seconds. The correction was slightly different than mine, but so what?
Of course, I was talking about AI. In this case, I used Google’s Bard. I felt it has the lowest barrier to entry: all you need is a Google account.
I emailed the corrected script from Bard and told the customer he owed me nothing. The next day, I found he had sent $150 to my PayPal account, which was very nice of him.
I’ve had these resurrections before. I had a customer track me down about a script I had written twelve years earlier. I was still working then, and AI was not an option, so I made the change he requested and…
