A colleague recently said something that’s been rattling around in my head: “AI gives you speed, but it doesn’t give you direction.” And the more I use these tools, the more I think that undersells the danger.

I have been wondering how to think about AIs (or genies) and how computers are like bicycles for the mind, as Steve Jobs put it, and I think these tools take it further. They are more like motorcycles for the mind. They go really fast, and you better not treat them like a bike, because you need to know what you’re doing. How to handle that thing. You need to make sure you don’t try to go too fast too soon, or for too long, because you’ll get speed blind and… things will happen.

I’m running an open source project called gocd-cli which is, well, a command line interface for Go continuous delivery. The intention is to make it easier to handle common tasks around Go. But this post isn’t really about that.

This project is supposed to be as portable as I can make it, becuse the original need I felt for it was born on RHEL6. Which is blessed with Python 2.6 by default. And we should definitely be looking to the future, meaning supporting Python 3, and I luckily got a pull request for just that. Since I couldn’t find any free hosted Go around I went for the next best thing, Snap CI, which is also built by ThoughtWorks.

I’ve for almost a year now been using Python as my day to day language as it’s what is used at my job. I’m starting to come around to really liking most parts of Python now, although there is definitely parts that are way more clunky than I would expect from a language so popular. And especially given how much talk there’s about the included batteries and to a small extent how there seems to bit of dickishness involved with hard core Python people. For an example of the latter just: