Hi all,
Revisiting an old project today, but this time with AI. Short story: AI is an absolutely wild accelerator. I've also noticed the AI gets tired. More on that anthropomorphization towards the end.
What I built: A Morning Receipt Printer. It has the current weather, hour by hour, 5 day forecast, a Calvin and Hobbes (of course!), and a quote of the day.
The receipts look like this:
This is a far cry from what I had a few years ago and I was able to build this version in in a fraction of the time. Previously, I was limited to some fairly rudimentary web scraping that I'd pipe via the linux command line directly in to a printer. And it took a lot of Googling and looking things up to get to that point.
This version took maybe half a day to build. The new stack uses a custom webpage for the layout, renders that to a pdf using a browser testing tool called Puppeteer, than sends the pdf to the printer. I knew about these technologies before, but now with AI, just the awareness of that stack is enough to be really productive.
The hardest part (as it was last time), was fixing the printer drivers again and diagnosing a weird printer behavior. A missing driver setting was causing the printer to look for a label notch, rather than understanding it was printing to a continuous roll. It kept on feeding paper in odd patterns.
That was hard, and also figuring out what the actual printable area was. Every time I tried sending a test print, the printer drivers were also scaling the image to fit the printable area. It was a goose chase.
But creating the gorgeous new web based layout was barely 15 minutes, and that would have been a multi day activity before, if not longer. Pulling the weather icons and whether APIs together was trivial for the AI. I provided a little guidance and oversight on the graphic design, that was it.
The AI Gets Tired
Anyway, I was at the part where the AI was going in circles trying to figure out the image scaling thing, and nothing was moving forward productively. This is of course, a metaphor for me getting tired and not prompting well. After a good night's sleep, it occurred to me to send a simple checkerboard pattern to the printer to figure out my scaling and imageable area issues, and then the AI was back on track.
So letting the AI rest for an evening made it work better. (And this isn't the first time I've noticed that the AI works better after a good night's sleep.)
best regards!
Sam Feller
aka THE Awkward Engineer