Living in the Present

I watched a video the other night about new co-pilot features coming in November for the Office suite. The demonstration included summarising the unread contents of an Outlook inbox to find pertinent information about a specific topic, scanning Teams meeting recordings to extract actions and key information, and turning raw data in Excel into reports with visualisations based on a prerogative.

As someone with access to multiple O365 enterprise licences, and working on many, many projects I saw a lot of potential being demonstrated and I figured I should aim to be on the bleeding edge when it came to AI augmentation of my workload.

Edge has a built in Bing AI query these days, which is available already, so I decided to hone my skills by asking it a question about the client credentials plugin for the HTTP Request component in Mule to see if it could solve a configuration problem I'd spent the past day trying to resolve.

Well, blow me down, it came back in thirty seconds with a solution that sounded exactly right, and it included some source code that quite simply added the missing custom JWT claim I was trying and failing to find a place for through the wizard.

I was not surprised when I added this code and received a compilation error. This is not the first time an AI LLM has blatantly lied to me when it comes to code. Earlier I was experimenting with possibly building a Svelte app and I didn't want to learn the Wikipedia API, but after Chat GPT kept inventing new query params I realised I would probably have to.

It was a sunny afternoon today so I decided to make a coffee smoothie after lunch. Normally I prepare this in the blender by starting it on power level 3 for 30 seconds, then increasing the level by 1 every 45 seconds or so. About four minutes later this typically results in two litres of thick, creamy and consistent smoothie. For some reason today I was compelled to press the pre-programmed "Smoothie" button and I watched in horror as the blender separated the ice from the liquid, and created a half glacier half ice-melt half-filled jug. Again, AI had let me down. I guess I'll have to keep using my brain and wrists for another few months yet.