Updates in the Void
It's been a while, where do I start?
In 2022 I broke my back (annular tear.) Around the same time, ChatGPT started picking up steam because it got a web interface. I fell in love with it right away, I saw the magic. I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. The ability to harness the power of reasoning?!?! what a time to be alive.
With my back being broke, i barely could sleep, i would just lie awake hoping to pass out for hours. At most I would get 2 hours of sleep at a time, maybe 4 hours a night. I was miserable. But my brother was going to travel in February and I already told him I would house sit for him. So I told myself I was going to dive deep into LLMs and ChatGPT during this down time.
So when February rolled around I dedicated myself to learning as much as possible about how neural networks worked (huge shoutout to Andrej Karpathy's Neural Networks: Zero to Hero) and trying to code with AI (this was before Claude Code, Aider, or Codex mind you.) Work ended up planning a GenAI hackathon in March as well, "cool" i thought.
When the hackathon eventually rolled around, I won one of the categories ("Most Impactful to the Company") on a team with just a PM and me. He made the presentation and I made the demo / app. It was an AI agent that had the context of what page you were on, and what actions were available to you as a user on said page. This (along with us defining what actions were available to what entities and on what pages) allowed the agent to perform actions for you. This was before MCP was a thing.
The bit I didn't know at the time, was that the company already had an internal team working on an AI chat bot, and apparently they got in a lot of heat for something I made in a couple of days that had more functionality than theirs.
I ended up having to show them how my baby worked and handing it off to them. I got invited to a couple of meetings with designers which seemed like it was a way for them to get my feedback on the project and I was always happy to help, but it always hurt. And I ended up getting the can shortly after the company went IPO. I was depressed beforehand, which led to me not being a great employee, so I don't feel bitter or resentful.
Getting fired actually led me to sleeping better. The very next day I had the best sleep I'd had in years, no joke.
Since then I've been working on side projects (how often do you really have the chance to bet on yourself?), and recently I've started trying to figure out how to get back into the workforce, but it's brutal out there.
I originally wanted to write a post about my findings on how to work best with AI, and some of the things I've been working on, but thought I should start with an update on me.