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Here's a bit of a 🧵 with this one user's experience trying to get a little smidge of productivity out of generative AI coding. TLDR: it's taken three years, but (one of) the bots has finally accomplished a simple task for me, so chalk one up for AI.

I have largely been a gen-AI skeptic since ChatGPT's advent. We're always two years off from AGI or recursive self-improvement or superintelligence singularity, no matter when you start. It's like the whole industry closed its eyes and adopted the ludicrous Musk promise horizon.

But I also try to make sure my skepticism doesn't blind me to actual real-world advances — not benchmark BS but everyday accomplishments — and here is one.

I always wanted a local archive of the 600+ articles I wrote for Axios during my seven or so years working there. Axios' site has a nice author page but it's chunked into 5-stories-at-a-time and the prospect of manually copying those files always daunted me.

When people started claiming that AI was writing decent code in 2023, I began asking chatGPT and later Claude and other tools to do this job for me. The tools failed miserably for a long time.

I could do that with effort. But the whole point here was to eliminate effort! If this was going to be a time-saver, AI would have to do more of the grunt-work itself.

I kind of gave up on this for a while but when Casey Newton and others started singing the praises of Glaze I thought, OK, let's try this. And Glaze pulled it off. I think part of the win here for them is that they have focused on one specific dev path (making MacOS apps) that suited me.

At first the glaze agent made a series of mistakes that rendered the app useless. But its debugging was smart and easy. One by one, it took in my bug reports ("it's not getting past the cloudflare challenge page" or "we've got a full list of URLs but no body text") and fixed them.