Friends of mine keep asking “what can AI do?” and it’s such a difficult question to answer, partially because the answer is changing every month. Every week. Every day. Two years ago AI was generating pictures of people with seven fingers and couldn’t seem to spell anything correctly. Today people are using their phones to generate realistic looking videos from photos or simply prompts. Last year, a completely AI-generated song (“Walk My Walk”) hit number one on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales Chat. Things are changing very quickly.

Over the past several months, AI app-development has gone through the roof. Just a couple of years ago, people were trying to get AI to write BASIC programs for the Commodore 64 just to see if it could. Sometimes it was successful, sometimes it got close, and sometimes the results were wildly unsuccessful. That was AI from two years ago, which was the middle ages.

I keep seeing ads for AI sites that will help you generate websites and phone apps, and seeing new games and applications developed using AI. I decided to throw my hat into the ring this week and see just how easy (or hard) it is to make my own program using AI.

Years ago, I wrote a simple search program that was so simple, I didn’t even give it a name. It’s a batch file called “s.bat”. Because I have so much data on my server, I dump the directories into text files nightly and search those text files instead of searching the physical directories because it’s super fast. I probably wrote this program 20 years ago and, other than very minor updates, remains essentially unchanged.

I thought it would be nice to have an updated version of this program, something I could easily launch in Windows and give me a few nice options like being able to copy and paste results, change the fonts, and a few other things.

So, I opened up the free version of ChatGPT, dropped the batch file into the window along with the same screenshot you see above, and said “create a stand alone program that does what this thing does.”

It said “okay” and two minutes later, sent me the .exe file. That was it.

That was version 1.0. I asked ChatGPT what features it suggested I add. It suggested 10, I accepted 6, and it quickly cranked out version 1.1. I noticed the program didn’t have its own icon so I asked it to make one and, poof, version 1.2.

I’ve been using version 1.2 for a few days and decided it would be nice if I could toggle the highlighting feature in the results box off and on. I opened ChatGPT and everything I had done last weekend was still there. I asked it to add another checkbox, and it did. ChatGPT has no concept of time; as far as it was concerned there had been no break in our conversation.

We are rapidly approaching a point where the best programs are not created by the best programmers, but by the people with the best ideas. The ability to code will become less important than the ability to be able to prompt AI to deliver intended results. It’s coming.

This post was written by a human, but I’m not sure why.