This is definitely something I have been mulling as I 'made' several software projects that I have been tossing around in my head over my lifetime via vibe-coding recently that would have taken me 10x to 100x the time to a MVP, with AI, i can push it way beyond the MVP and enchance and enrich with features I may not have considered without the almost immediate MVP production.
What is the end-product value? I definitely have found value for myself since its things that I considered for a while for myself. Others may appreciate the end product. But is the value of the end product the 'original idea'? or the comprehensive prompt to produce it again? the number of tokens it burned to produce the end product? The number hours it took me to work on it to get the end product? (debugging, enchancing, user interface, design)?
Answers I dont have, but questions I have been mulling while immensely enjoying being able to produce random ideas I have had in me head for decades fairly quickly.
I agree whole heartedly. My aging father went through a process of trying to call in a repair/replacement on a oven on a extended warranty, and the level of run around and hoops he had to take to get them to process and actually perform the service was incredible, things like having to pull out the oven and take a pic of the serial number and send it via email to several addresses, pictures of the receipt, contract, etc. Its a good thing he kept good records. Eventually after several weeks of back and forth and 3 failed repair attempts, they sent him a check for the full amount for replacement.
Compute! had a fork? of a magazine specifically for Commodore Computers called 'Compute! Gazette' https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette I spent many of days in my youth typing in the pages of code they included at the end of every issue.
Oh that 'free' 3g was amazing! I was able to hobble through gmail through the browser, and even wrote a kindle-friendly Zork website so one could play text games on it allowing you to choose from a bunch of zmachine roms. Had some traction getting mentioned on a few news websites.
The few instances I travelled in remote areas with little to no Internet, and moreover no over the air TV reception, I always mulled how a simple 1K-2k setup with a mini PC running plex and a 10-20TB of disk space could provide an plex TV media library (movies, tv, audio) for a small neighborhood. Throw in Ubooquity for books and audiobooks, you can provide a massive library of media entertainment and education to the area. (of course, copyrights be damned) also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
I recall in the late 80s on vt100's accessing BITNET allowed you to 'net send'-like to other BITNET nodes around the country. I used to randomly try to contact other users at other random educational institutions after using the 'finger' equivalent to remote BITNET sites. I can only imagine how my messaging probably messed up their terminal session screens and just end-user confusion ensuing.
Another 'write' unix shenanigans was the ability to send control sequences, so one could send a 'terminal reset' sequence to any user online a terminal room using a dumb terminal (wyse, vt100 etc) and it would quickly reset the terminal and log them off. One could even send a long sequence of control strings to force a crude ascii animation, then reset terminal if you wish. (not me of course)
This seems like a step closer to the 'Her' movie AI entity (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) , or more closely, the scene where she converses with a Alan Watts, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exe7yup2Yu0 where in the movie did something that this inifiniteconversation has done in terms of feeding in a deceased philosophers works and voice to create an AI representation of the person.
What is the end-product value? I definitely have found value for myself since its things that I considered for a while for myself. Others may appreciate the end product. But is the value of the end product the 'original idea'? or the comprehensive prompt to produce it again? the number of tokens it burned to produce the end product? The number hours it took me to work on it to get the end product? (debugging, enchancing, user interface, design)?
Answers I dont have, but questions I have been mulling while immensely enjoying being able to produce random ideas I have had in me head for decades fairly quickly.