by dekhn | 2025-08-12 23:09:02+00:00
For context I'm a principal software engineer who has worked in and out of machine learning for decades (along with a bunch of tech infra, high performance scientific computing, and a bunch of hobby projects).

In the few weeks since I've started using Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude, I've

1. had it read my undergrad thesis and the paper it's based on, implementing correct pytorch code for featurization and training, along wiht some aspects of the original paper that I didn't include in my thesis. I had been waiting until retirement until taking on this task.

2. had it write a bunch of different scripts for automating tasks (typically scripting a few cloud APIs) which I then ran, cleaning up a long backlog of activities I had been putting off.

3. had it write a yahtzee game and implement a decent "pick a good move" feature . It took a few tries but then it output a fully functional PyQt5 desktop app that played the game. It beat my top score of all time in the first few plays.

4. tried to convert the yahtzee game to an android app so my son and I could play. This has continually failed on every chat agent I've tried- typically getting stuck with gradle or the android SDK. This matches my own personal experience with android.

5. had it write python and web-based g-code senders that allowed me to replace some tools I didn't like (UGS). Adding real-time vis of the toolpath and objects wasn't that hard either. Took about 10 minutes and it cleaned up a number of issues I saw with my own previous implementations (multithreading). It was stunning how quickly it can create fully capable web applications using javascript and external libraries.

6. had it implement a gcode toolpath generator for basic operations. At first I asked it to write Rust code, which turned out to be an issue (mainly because the opencascade bindings are incomplete), it generated mostly functional code but left it to me to implement the core algorithm. I asked it to switch to C++ and it spit out the correct code the first time. I spent more time getting cmake working on my system than I did writing the prompt and waiting for the code.

7. had it Write a script to extract subtitles from a movie, translate them into my language, and re-mux them back into the video. I was able to watch the movie less than an hour after having the idea- and most of that time was just customizing my prompt to get several refinements.

8. had it write a fully functional chemistry structure variational autoencoder that trains faster and more accurate than any I previously implemented.

9. various other scientific/imaging/photography related codes, like impleemnting multi-camera rectification, so I can view obscured objects head-on from two angled cameras.

With a few caveats (Android projects, Rust-based toolpath generation), I have been absolutely blown away with how effective the tools are (especially used in a agent which has terminal and file read/write capabilities). It's like having a mini-renaissance in my garage, unblocking things that would have taken me a while, or been so frustrating I'd give up.

I've also found that AI summaries in google search are often good enough that I don't click on links to pages (wikipedia, papers, tutorials etc). The more experience I get, the more limitations I see, but many of those limitations are simply due to the extraordinary level of unnecessary complexity required to do nearly anything on a modern computer (see my comments about about Android apps & gradle).