Because of my friend, Claude.
I know this sounds like the cheesiest ad ever but its true. After the first week all of Holy week was spent moving my clients to the new server. It was somewhat repetitive except for cases when it wasn’t.
Having said all that about Claude and all, did it go smoothly?
Hell no.
Here are notes if you’re going to use AI to do something very complex like what we did.
– Be absolutely, absolutely as specific as you can.
– provide images, examples, links to what you want.
– !IMPORTANT! Tell it what YOU DONT WANT. Probably as important if not more important than the telling it what you do want.
I realized this on the 2nd day of working on it when it started asking questions we had already covered exhaustively the day before. I then realized the only solution was to hunker down and write a very long text file where I laid out each domain and put extensive notes beside it as to what I wanted to achieve.
And this requires believe it or not – old school GOOD WRITING SKILLS.
This means being clear, concise, emphasizing what needs to be emphasized and putting yourself in the place of your audience – in this case an over eager super tech assistant to try and see if it’ll get what you want to happen – but inspite of that still an assistant that can on occasion do some really dumb things.
One for example, was when i needed it to SSH (send) a huge file from one server to another it chose for some reason to tunnel it into my PC first and then to the server, forgetting somehow it could just send it directly. After I stopped to rest my PC suspended and consequently the transfer stopped, wasting a whole day. Another situation was when we couldn’t get a site to work until we found out AI had been giving me the wrong IP Addresses to update on Cloudflare. It took a few tickets to the hosting support to realize this again wasting a day and whilst an honest mistake seems such an odd one for AI – with all its incredible powers – to make.
So let me lay down for you what you need for AI to do complex tasks:
– You need to communicate well – If you cannot write instructions well, you are f&cked. If you are unable to give directions to people on how to get from Point a to Point B, I won’t mince words, stick with simple AI use. Good news is you can work on this you just have to practice. Bad news is there’s just no way around it. AI will try to fill in the gaps with unclear instructions and you will end up with slop.
– In my case, you need to know how to code AND how to do System Administration. That means if you’re a lawyer who wants AI to do complex tasks, you need to know the law. If you’re a chemist who wants AI to do complex tasks, you need to know chemistry. If you’re a building engineer who wants AI to do complex tasks, you need to be a building engineer.
If I just said ‘transfer these sites to new server’ and leave it at that, it MIGHT do it, but it will fail immediately afterwards and I will spend the next two weeks dealing with customer complaints.
At least for now, AI is a ‘multiplier’ of your abilities. It’s extra arms and legs that are faster and lets you do more of stuff YOU KNOW. It’s like a chef telling an assistant to make a specific dish he has in mind but leaving out the details. The assistant will do it but his own way, and likely will be different from how he wanted.
Ok that’s enough thoughts for now. I think I have to write these things more to exercise my own writing. BTW if you haven’t noticed already this is not AI generated. I wrote this on my own with my own fingers, which is a weird flex but relevant today.
Oh and I have two new projects I will write about soon. I am so excited.