The MCP and other AI tools

Walkin’ in an AI Wonderland

Merry Christmas!

Since I have a free morning, I thought I’d surprise the Internet with an update. I’ve been working with / deploying LLM tools for a few years now, and I wanted to get some of my thoughts documented so I can laugh at myself when I’m really old - so basically, next week at the rate AI is evolving.

At this point in the timeline, I don’t see a future where we aren’t leveraging an AI tool (or some AI-powered interface), regardless of industry. Like cryptocurrency, this genie can never be placed back into its bottle. In fact, even if we don’t end up in AGI Wonderland™ with our robot overlords, interacting with an open-ended, human-like “super-intelligence” is simply far too alluring. If you haven’t tried it, I’d whole-heartedly encourage you to do so; you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Although I sometimes spend more time cajoling these things into giving me less falsehoods than actually being productive, I still send them quite a bit of daily tasks. Here’s a small list of things that I personally use them for:

  • Summarizing digital content (who has time to read the whole Interwebs?)
  • Image to… (image to ICS, image to audio, etc.)
  • Planning (and reviewing plans, and reviewing the reviews of plans…)
  • Diagramming (mermaid diagrams, etc because apparently my stick figures aren’t “professional enough”)

Personally, I’ve tried to stay away from content generation, as I’m still futilely trying to hold onto a modicum of thinking.

Since I still dabble in a bit of software (when the AI lets me), here’s what I typically send to the models:

  • Well-defined development tasks (adding types, documenting, boilerplate, logging and all the other things developers pretend to enjoy)
  • Difficult tasks that I’ve either worked on before or for a language I know well enough to spot when the AI is confidently making stuff up

If it’s a difficult, new task for a language I don’t know well (e.g. Rust), I don’t bother sending it to the models anymore because I’ve found that I normally spend more time fighting the machine than it being my complement.

Here’s my current tools list:

Daily

Libraries

Funsies

Watching

Hope you have a happy holidays, and see y’all next year!