First Light... How Fast & Effective Is Coding Via Just AI Prompts Right Now? ~ Very Solid With The Right Pilot 30May26

First Light Via AI... TK is a coding savant. I was interested in, and he was interested to share, how just AI prompts can lead to solid software outcomes... even finished applications. I presented a fairly small task, but one requiring UI,  data base lookups, vector math, GPS reads, etc. We used Anthropic Claude with the initial prompt of: "Find the 1st light of day at any location on earth, cognizant of elevation and surrounding terrain." I will not bore you with the intervening 4 hrs of interaction among me, TK, and Claude. We ultimately specified we wanted to use all free government databases for topographic and all other information, and we wanted to download tiny pieces so we could afford to be offline. My good friend Wilks wanted the function because he's a wildernaut and loves to rise for "First Light" outside the tent. Elevation and topography are critical as, especially here in Colorado, being below mountain tops "delay" or "accelerate" sunsets and sunrises (yes, we did Last Light too). I was astounded how just the last 4 years of progress have led AI to enable breakthroughs on ideas and coding, from just prompts. I was aware all evening though that a thoughtful pilot and result reviewer is needed to net a good yield. Fear not (yet?) softies, embrace and use or be toast. Here is the evening's output, it's simple to ask a phone for it's GPS location but we were on desktops so just input the location.

Marketing... I did further research on the "marketing/profit" efficacy of release of this or a tweaked version and there are several already in place. We deemed the costs and time of iOS approval for the Apple AppStore not warranted; same holds true for Android. The overhead and loss of potential revenue to the infrastructure owners was onerous and stopped further pursuit. Still, you get the idea that we got here quickly with AI prompts, not a quarter of dev and test... Amazing. 

Implications... Yet, I can readily imagine an online request to Claude of: "What time will first sunlight hit me tomorrow?" being answered easily. Gotta be online to one of those mega-data-centers filled with my water, electricity, RAM, CPU, & NVidia chips though. Further, to be "ok" with all of this you must assent to the fact that there is no copyrighting anymore as all this progress is on the back of uncompensated humans' efforts written before. The mining of all our code and all our prose currently aggrandizes primarily the billionaires in charge.