I knew this day was coming and yet somehow I’m still a little surprised but mostly frustrated because it couldn’t have come but a worse time. Of course I know that is a cliche and I probably would have said that whenever it came and then usually I find people follow up with; no really, it’s a bad time. I mean it.
So here’s the situation. I’ve been working on a serious web project for about a month or so. Now when I say serious I mean it is the most elaborate web project I have ever worked in my 30 years of web design for customers. The reason is that the customer bought a plugin that looked like it might do what they want but my customer has a customer of his own that’s making the decisions of what this web project is supposed to be and they requested things that were not part of the program.
They presented me with this over a year ago and I said no thank you. It’s too much for me and then earlier this year they came back to me and they said well we went ahead with it but we’ve reached some stumbling blocks so we’d like you to look at it again.
By stumbling blocks what they meant is this plug-in doesn’t do it the way we want it to so when you need to change the plug-in code and I don’t do programming web design so it was above my abilities but definitely above my pay grade because this particular customer doesn’t pay well. To be fair none of my customers pay what I would like to receive but that’s a me problem more than a them problem. I don’t ask for much because I work for praise.
So anyway I’m bad at saying no so I said yes and mainly because these days I know I can get AI assistance and the programming part isn’t done by me but by an unpaid intern AI. In this case all of the AIs on team frogstar.
Unfortunately, AIs are not fantastic at programming yet. They’re really good at creating programs out of nothing. Or a prompt that says make me a program that does this.
What they’re not very good at is the way that I program and that is to ask for specific tasks and keep changing the iterations over and over and over with little tweaks and customizations and ideas that come to me during the process. That’s what I’m good at but the programming to get those things done needs to be AI and they make it hard for me.
This particular program is modifying someone else’s WordPress plugin to do something it was never intended to do in a completely different way than it was designed. Programming hell.
But we’ve gotten pretty far in a month instead of a week as expected and we’re down to a point where the pages pretty much load and do what they’re supposed to do but the problem is they’re all interconnected and they still use portions of the original plugin and portions of the new code that we’ve written together.
The one thing that AI doesn’t do well is remember what it just did and in a program with 10 pages that interconnect with variables and database pulla, one small change on one page can break three other pages and if you go to fix them they might break the original page because the AI solved the problem you ask but isn’t context aware enough to realize it might be breaking something else. In the past two weeks I can’t get all 10 pages working at once. It is a Wak-a-Mole game of up and down pages that is so frustrating I wish I had the big hammer that usually comes with that game.
Which brings me to the problem of today. The frustration that I feel struggling with the AI has been felt by my computer as well, and as I say I wish I could whack the machine, the computer has done it for me and now chooses to shut down every 7 minutes or less. I thought it was overheating but it might not be. I thought it was malware but I cleaned it. It might be the fans are clogged because there is a lot of particles in the air when you live on a farm with pets.
So here I am potentially one day away from completion of the draft that will be evaluated by the client and the client’s client and then they’ll probably make a hundred change requests that should have been made three months ago when I asked them but they also believe I should have been done three months ago so it’s a standoff. I don’t bring it up.
I accept and adapt. My new motto for everything in life. When you adopt the lifestyle of accept and adapt you get for free the bonus of not having to make decisions about your life. The decisions are made for you and you accept and adapt.
Today’s decision is my computer is not going to work out for completion of this task but luckily 40 years of experience in tech support I have alternatives and the files are on the web so I’ve never lost anything when the computer goes down.
Instead of getting angry, frustrated and depressed about this new challenge of not having a computer and needing the computer, I accept and adapt and I will be working on my TV with my phone as the engine and Samsung dex as the desktop.
If I’m lucky the problem will be solved within a day or two if reality hits me with more ups and downs still, I will accept and adapt jump over those hurdles put aside those obstacles and complete the underpaid task. But for now I have to go clean up the dog poo.
I can’t fall behind my regular chores too work on my computer chores.
