I wrote my first “program” in BASIC in the nineteen-eighties and suffered through years of trial and error, slow methodical practice, and over the years that followed I learned how to code.  

I realized too late into my post-secondary education that I was more interested in computers than anything else I was studying and I should have followed my passions for algorithmic artistry into a computer science degree instead of where I went instead, but all of that is spilled milk now and I only mention it to give some context to the fact that up until this year, twenty-twenty six, I routinely got my hands dirty in code.

This year I seriously dabbled in generative code for the first time.

Specifically I asked an LLM to look into an issue I was having trying to get a web session to persist on a server where I didn’t have control over the clean up processes and where it was deleting my login after ten minutes.

It barfed out an answer in a few seconds, and when I looked it over for obvious flaws or holes and found none I cautiously dropped it into my applet code.

It has been working perfectly for months.

I won’t say it was a challenging problem, but had I needed to solve it the way I’ve been solving those problems for four decades it would have involved countless hours of experimenting, digging through forum posts, being scolded by gatekeeping coders whose only hobby seems to be logging into those forums and yelling at people trying to learn, and probably breaking my app a few dozen times. 

The instant fix of the AI was addictive. Seamless. Clean. Easy. Done.

And I learned absolutely nothing.