3AM Lab Notes
Working up one level
Intelligence is now a commodity — and if you can say what you want built, you just became a programmer.
Technology is a game-changer, says Captain Obvious.
The more powerful and far-reaching the technology, the greater the shift. In Viber, a messaging app, you now get PhD-level intelligence for free. Yes, they added ChatGPT. It isn’t an agent (yet), but, hey, it can tell you the capital city of every country on the planet or the chemical formula for chlorophyll. It knows. I asked.
Intelligence is now a commodity.
You just became a programmer.
Programming has gone a long way. In the ’40s and ’50s, we had machine language, then assembly, then FORTRAN and COBOL. Bell Labs dropped C in the ’70s, and the march away from hardware continued. That move led to an explosion of increasingly abstract and capable languages that now power the services and apps we use. And every one of those languages required specialized training.
Funny enough, programming is, in a nutshell, telling the machine what you specifically want it to do. The languages provided the vocabulary that allowed these trained folks to do more.
It’s not magic. It took a ton of really, really smart people to get us here. But today, the “new” programming language is the one they teach you at home and in school: spoken language. LLMs have turned spoken language into a programming language, and everyone became a programmer without knowing it. They just need to know what they want to build.
That is a lot of preamble for a guy who likes solving stuff, but this is just me testing the openwriter fork my boys from Ollama cooked up. We built a custom workflow behind it and added multi-tenancy, with the agent assistant baked into the panels rather than having to use a separate harness. Who would have thunk an infrastructure guy could do all that code? smh.