You can probably repeat this blog post headline for any given service every week at this point…

Anyway! I’ve been on board the generative AI train for a few years now and it’s amazing to see how far it’s come. In October 2023, I got access to DALL-E 3 and was pretty impressed with its ability to render text.

Yesterday, OpenAI announced 4o Image Generation and boy does it kick things up a notch or two!

It’s ability to generate images and render text according to your exact prompt is incredible. We can now have full on automated AI memebots.

A four panel cartoon strip

• first panel: a software engineer sitting in front of a computer screen on a Zoom meeting
• second panel: the software engineer tells the participants (with a speech bubble): “I’m telling you, AI is coming for our jobs!”
• third panel: we just see a slight closeup of the software engineer (the computer monitor isn’t visible)
• fourth panel: same as the first panel except all the participants are now robots

Same angle and setup in every panel, reduced art style, broad outlines

Or, how about:

Cartoon drawing of a bored computer programmer sitting in front of a computer just pressed “enter” over and over. He is sarcastically excited and says, “Vibe coding. Wooooo.”

You can also feed it source images and it will run with it as well. So, obviously we need to use the Canine Calibration System.

I even gave it an image of me and told it to make a movie poster:

Create a dramatic cyberpunk 1980s horror movie poster image featuring a Computer Monster (We see an LCD screen with evil eyes and fangs and it has robotic legs) in a dark alley. In front of the monster, we see the man in this source image passed out on the ground, broken glasses lay next to him. At the top of the poster is the title of the movie in digital writing: “BUFFER OVERFLOW” at the bottom in the billing area, we see text that says, “Some bugs were never meant to be fixed.”

Or rewrite history…

Or really, really rewrite history…

It’s just wild. It’s coming for us as engineers, as musicians, as artists, as writers. This 2024 post on Twitter sums it up:

You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

– Joanna Maciejewska on Twitter

Hmm, this sounds like a 4-panel comic to me!

Last summer at work, I embarked on a solo project to convert over 800 of our unit tests for various React components from using Enzyme¹ to React Testing Library² as part of a larger migration to React v18, TypeScript, and moving our code into a larger monorepo at Zillow.

This process was made much easier thanks to using the power of LLMs!

Just this week, I have seen two blog posts from various dev teams detailing how they did the same thing!

“How we navigated the shift from Enzyme to React Testing Library at The New York Times.“

As part of our efforts to maintain and improve the functionality and performance of The New York Times core website, we recently upgraded our React library from React 16 into React 18. One of the biggest challenges we faced in the process was transforming our codebase from the Enzyme test utility into the React Testing Library.

And today, I saw this from the AirBnb Tech Blog: “Accelerating Large-Scale Test Migration with LLMs“

Airbnb recently completed our first large-scale, LLM-driven code migration, updating nearly 3.5K React component test files from Enzyme to use React Testing Library (RTL) instead. We’d originally estimated this would take 1.5 years of engineering time to do by hand, but — using a combination of frontier models and robust automation — we finished the entire migration in just 6 weeks.

¹ Enzyme is a JavaScript testing utility, originally developed by AirBnb, for React that allows developers to “traverse, manipulate, and simulate interactions with component trees”, but it relies on various implementation details and has become less relevant with modern React practices.

² React Testing Library is a lightweight testing framework for React that focuses on testing components as users interact with them, emphasizing accessibility and avoiding reliance on implementation details.

This is a first for me. Cursor attempted to “fix” an issue I was having with TypeScript by adding a // @ts-nocheck statement to the top of the file, essentially preventing TypeScript from running validation checks against the code.

Alright, living in the future is pretty damn cool!

We were in San Francisco this weekend and decided to try riding in a Waymo. This was insanely wild. It’s such an incredible novelty at first — taking pictures, watching with fascination as the the steering wheel moves all by itself and the car seamlessly navigates around obstacles and through traffic.

After awhile, you settle into it and quickly forget how crazy it is.