AI Helps Local Man Finish Project Before It Becomes Drawer Archaeology

At lunchtime today, a cheap open-hardware board arrived in my letterbox. Before I'd even started thinking about dinner, it had become a fully working voice-note device.

It records to an SD card, plays notes back, manages them through a delightfully retro web interface, supports titles and tags, works offline, sleeps between recordings, monitors its battery, and even makes a sad little WALL-E-style sound when power is low.

To be clear: I could already code this sort of thing. Without AI, however, it would have taken days or weeks. I would probably have become distracted during the tedious final 20%, left it "nearly finished" and eventually placed it in the drawer where promising electronics projects go to become archaeology.

Instead, AI-assisted coding helped me turn it into a genuinely finished, useful device in an afternoon.

Would this product suit everybody? Probably not. But it suits me perfectly and solves a real problem in my life. I didn't need to wait for a giant technology company to decide the market was profitable, turn the idea into a cloud service, and attach another subscription. I bought insanely cheap, flexible, off-the-shelf open hardware and made exactly what I wanted.

The public conversation about AI is still dominated by slogans about stolen copyright and environmental destruction. Those are legitimate subjects for scrutiny, but much of the coverage is incomplete, exaggerated, or stripped of context. It rarely shows this side of the story: ordinary people gaining the ability to create highly personal technology for themselves.

One telling data point: Stack Overflow received only about 1,400 new questions in July - more than 99% below its 2014 peak. The shift is already happening. (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/438596/stack-overflow-is-becoming-a-ghost-town-now-what)

AI didn't teach me how to code. It helped me finish. A lot of coding is boring and mundane, a lot of people won't tell you that bit, and so coding personal projects are especially hard when you hit that phase especially when something newer and shinier appears. AI is that force multiplier that makes finishing personal projects so much easier.

That might be the real game changer.

I've coded for well over 30 years at this point (40 if copying C=64 programs from magazines count) and it has served me well, I've travelled the world and done and seen amazing things on the back of my coding skills and experience. Looking back now, I highly doubt that that life would be possible any more. I remember when I was starting my career and part of my job was deploy fancy new UNIX systems to replace aging mainframes, it meant I met and talked to a lot of mainframe engineers and COBOL coders. You don't see them much any more these days, so is this just the natural cycle?