loading . . . AI is scary, but... I've been dabbling with AI. Like many overly hyped IT technologies before it, I'm skeptical. One of my clients sees the potential in AI, so I'm trying to give it a fair shot. So far, AI isn't winning me over.
I recently needed some code to run in an environment from Vendor X. Even though Vendor X is huge, their documentation sucks. Some basic things were eluding me, and where search engines used to help with this easily... not any more. A ton of slop, 20 minutes ad padded videos, and the usual snark from certain "help from the expert" websites is all you get nowadays.
So this is a Vendor X tool set. I turned to Vendor X's AI for some assistance.
Much to my surprise, it gave me a working example of the function call I had been struggling with. That was 100% useful to me.
Then I made the mistake of asking it to define some constants for me. This should have been trivial, find the constants table in the documentation, and a little rewrite to turn it into code. A lookup table of colors, like "red" pointing to a set of numbers that define red in the UI.
Should have trivial... Uh huh, pull the other one.
The code for the table looked perfect. Until you realize the colors are wrong. And their system is very careful about colors. In fact they warn you about it in their documentation... which the AI apparently read and forgot about it.
It took quite a number of tries to get the AI to actually look at the correct documentation. And a few more to get it to read it... Just a stupid mad lib generator with short term memory issues. Useless.
So, overall... it was a lose. More time correcting the idiot than saving time/effort. This stuff sucks and a lot of people are ignoring that. So, short term... yes, be concerned because people have too much faith in this matrix math garbage.
But long term, it will still be junk. And like any human fad, it will collapse under its own weight.
That's a totally unscientific opinion. But, unlike AI... it is an honest and truthful one. We will get through this... let's hope the next trend in IT is something fun, like large scale resurrection of legacy hardware level fun.
My advice, learn the AI tools and figure out what small things they can do to make your life easier. But, remember that it is a clumsy, random tool like a blaster. Not a civilized weapon for a more civilized age...
Some of the comments in the code snippet below, especially some of the emphatic "verified" ones came from the AI after being told it has screwed up again.
// While Google Gemini did assist me with getting the "update" call right. It got the following table wrong multiple times...
const API_COLORS = {
// Official Gmail API Color Palette (Verified)
// Source: https://developers.google.com/workspace/gmail/api/reference/rest/v1/users.labels#Color
'red': { backgroundColor: '#cc3a21', textColor: '#ffffff' }, // Verified official dark red
'orange': { backgroundColor: '#ffad47', textColor: '#000000' }, // Verified official orange
'yellow': { backgroundColor: '#f2c960', textColor: '#000000' }, // Verified official yellow
'green': { backgroundColor: '#16a766', textColor: '#ffffff' }, // Verified official dark green/teal
'teal': { backgroundColor: '#16a766', textColor: '#ffffff' }, // Uses the same verified dark green/teal option
'blue': { backgroundColor: '#4a86e8', textColor: '#ffffff' }, // Verified official bright blue
'purple': { backgroundColor: '#8e63ce', textColor: '#ffffff' }, // Verified official purple
'pink': { backgroundColor: '#f7a7c0', textColor: '#000000' }, // Verified official light pink
'gray': { backgroundColor: '#cccccc', textColor: '#000000' }, // Verified official light gray
// Use an empty object to clear the color
'clear': {}
}; https://netmbx.blogspot.com/2025/11/ai-is-scary-but.html
