Replies

So, the “learn to code” meme is false. Sounds like a good idea to put 4.4 million (from a simple search) or more people out of a job and render a couple valid hi-tech degrees worthless. Glad I am not going to be around to watch the bread lines and our submission to machines running our lives.

Note: been a real software engineer for 30 years and AI makes up less than 10% of my work effort (I use it for research and spot questions only, it never writes code for me) and compared to the new breed of developers my work product is delivered faster and accurate while they sit around trying to figure out how to give their job away.

I’m on a very, very low-to-bankrupt budget.

At 73, I live inside a hornet’s nest of tinnitus.

My vision in one eye is fuzzy. I wear glasses when I look at the computer.

I need to get more exercise because my gait is getting wobbly.

The county is covered with server farms.

I’m hoping the county will hire me. They have a program for guys like me.

But I’ve never written a stitch of code in my life.

About three weeks ago, I built an email software that self-improves. using Claude and a Claude code writer whose name I’ve forgotten. I worked the two together like R2D2 and 3PO (Star Trek reference). (Sometimes I would double-check claud’s work with Grok.) I put the email software up for sale online. But to make any sales, I need a whole ecosystem of funnels to bring in customers. I did not see a path to money anytime soon on this project.

So I saw some articles two weeks ago about what the guy in this news story was doing and set out to see if I could do the same thing.

I researched. I’ve talked a lot to Grok. Probably, Claude would be better. But I started with grok. And I’m finding that Grok will maintain the context window. over days and now over a week. So we are learning together about how to do this job.

I don’t have much money. The first thing is to find a way to do everything for free.

Oracle provides about 24 GB of free server space. Github provides all the free tools

I do pay grok $20@mo. So Grok helped me set that up. Grok turned the conversation into code, which I plugged in. It worked. Often, there was a lot of back-and-forth, trial-and-error. Often, my questions caused open loops. I’ve learned how to get grok out of them. Grok would sometimes try the same thing over and over again. I’ve learned how to tell Grok to spot failure patterns and to describe them so well that Grok can use them to interrogate forums and the software literature to find a solution. That solves persistent failures pretty fast.

So last week I started building a company that makes stuff and sells it using agents inside the Oracle Cloud. I have about 143 agentic tools right now and a comprehensive self-improvement architecture, both at the corporate and business levels. Grok keeps converting our conversation into code, then checks it for errors. Then we check to see if it runs.

I don’t know if I’ll be successful.

But this work gets me out of bed in the morning. Before, I struggled to maintain my full attention for more than a couple of hours. I work on this all day and night.

In short. It’s fun. And addictive. (I may go bankrupt. But I’ll have fun all the way down the slide until the drop.)

"Note: been a real software engineer for 30 years and AI makes up less than 10% of my work effort (I use it for research and spot questions only, it never writes code for me) and compared to the new breed of developers my work product is delivered faster and accurate while they sit around trying to figure out how to give their job away."

I've been a software and aerospace engineer for 45 years, and I use AI to create software tools that I use all the time. I also use it to speed up DevOps operations by a large factor. Many of the things that AI has empowered me to do I simply could not justify taking time to do in years past ... and don't even get me started on clearing out tech debt with AI!