Learning to Code

All emergent technologies have their Alphas

I know this article follows very soon after the previous AI article, but a significant omission was pointed out to me by a new follower on X who also happens to be what I will hereafter refer to as an “Alpha”.

In the previous article, I mentioned my recently acquired friend, “Sibey”, who is very enthusiastic about all things AI. Art, music, lyrics and writing, he leverages the technology to accelerate, improve, and obtain access to creative channels that would otherwise take him years to master.

I will openly declare that I envy him his energy and enthusiasm because he is someone who has seen the possibilities and is willing (and able) to invest the time to master a recent technology. Are his creations “professional”? Well, that’s a kind of double edged consideration, honestly, and one that doesn’t really matter for his purposes.

I think they’re quite good, but I can see where the human touch is missing. For Sibey on the other hand, they are suitable to his need for the most part. When they are not, he reaches out to true artists to commission work that will meet his objectives. In this, I think his attitude is wise and makes good use of his level of mastery and assists in his pursuit of his endeavors.

Sibey, however, is not an “Alpha”.

Please understand that the term “Alpha” is my own. There are, quite probably, various in-the-know identifiers to define the kind of person I am going to describe, but the rabbit hole there is deep and very, very twisty.

What it comes down to is coding.

I’m sure everyone remembers the derogatory declaration that coal miners needed to “learn to code” as their industry fell on hard times due to the heavy hand of Liberal regulation. I have a similar attitude to most government bureaucrats and would gleefully sling the same imperative at Teachers Union and DEI administrators.

However, every time there has been a major innovation in computer technology, the coding requirement has changed. Change is a daunting thing to many humans, but to others it sings like a Siren’s song.

The “Alpha” that I refer to is someone who takes on the challenge with a focus and determination that only someone who is discovering something amazing and new for the first time can truly understand. They not only want to understand the new technology, they want to master it, live it, swim in the details and come out the other side enlightened and in control. The new thing, whatever it is, lines up with their own wants and desires so perfectly that they are subsumed by it.

That is what I mean when I refer to “Alpha”. Not just a first adopter, but someone dedicated to mastering a new technology as fast and as thoroughly as they can.

My new follower on X is an Alpha. He has rightly understood that AI prompts are an avenue into a new kind of coding and has adjusted accordingly.

How does this tie in to me “missing” something in the original article?

He rightly pointed out that I basically did not tie together how people learning to manipulate the AI prompts would experience changes in their communication skills.

My new Alpha friend explained to me that his writing and communication skills had significantly improved as he plumbed the depths of prompt coding. When he made this claim, a lightbulb flickered on in my small dark space that keeps my ears apart and I understood something that is both enlightening and a bit frightening.

I lived through the first rush of computer nerdery, when many a bright eyed and pasty faced youth began to chase “programming”. This eventually became known as “coding” in the profession, but it was “programming” at first. Which led to hacking. Which led to cracking. Which led to all manner of various endeavors, legal and otherwise, floating through the ether of “da interwebs” (a term I use knowingly, yes, to poke fun.)

Web pages had to be coded and many folks immersed themselves there, too. This actually ended up migrating into common vernacular (the “/sarc” note that appears occasionally in online writing to made it absolutely double certainly clear that sarcasm was preceding the code, for example.)

Which is all fine and good, until it isn’t. Life is like that. If you charge too deeply into a niche community, you can suddenly find that you can only talk well within the group and start getting looked at funny outside of it.

Anyway, back to my Alpha friend.

He provided a lengthy message string to me discussing how his efforts in manipulating the phrasing (the coding) of AI prompts had directly impacted his own powers of communication and made his writing more clear and concise with more efficient punctuation. It really is fascinating going through his message because it is a window into the mind of someone quite intelligent who has put a lot of effort into understanding and mastering a skill that many people may not even realize is necessary or, frankly, extant.

He even tied it to Snow Crash, an almost prophetic novel by Neal Stephenson from 1992 that foresaw much of the oncoming AI world. References to the novel peppered his view of what he was doing in a holistic way.

In any case, after I finished reading it and digesting it as best I could for a bit, I shook my head to clear the fog. Then I fed copy-pasted it into Grok and asked the AI to choke it down to my feeble mental level.

I mean, I could tell that he had hit upon an innovative way of parsing and encoding his queries into the AI prompt, but he had gone well beyond that and referred to things I just did not get. The Snow Crash references were trying to tell me something that I just was not grabbing hold of. Things that were well outside my reading or experience base.

He had, frankly, run so far ahead that I could no longer see him.

Well, it turns out that this person (I’ve been assuming it’s a he, so I guess I’d best continue that convention), is absolutely brilliant and has created his own coding language for AI prompts. (I kind of got that, but I didn’t realize how amazing it was.)

What he has essentially achieved is high intensity AI-symbiosis. He has modified his communication syntax to achieve more clarity in communication with the AI model he prefers. This is an Alpha achievement.

So, here are the two sides of the coin: on the heads side is Sibey, learning by doing but not going down the syntax rabbit hole. On the tails side is the Alpha, actively optimizing the input into effective AI code to drive the results more precisely.

Both achieve results suitable for their efforts. The Alpha represents the one fully immersed in and dedicated to mastering the tech. Sibey just wants to achieve more without sacrificing too much time and effort.

The Alpha, therefore, is at the greatest existential risk.

Sibey remains grounded in his “now”, fully integrated with those not subsumed in AI fever.

The Alpha, however, is chasing his dream and reveling in his association with the AI as much as the results (outside of metering his efficacy in communication.) The risk of human interaction compromise and possible dysphoria is real. Not to say that it will happen, but it rapidly becomes a distinct possibility.

Having seen that frightening possibility, I have to admit the efforts of all the Alphas out there will eventually drive the next innovative leap forward, provided the platform upon which they base their efforts continues to evolve with them. Some of what they achieve will be amazing. Some of it may well be terrifying. This is always the risk with human innovation.

Me? All I can do is shake my head in wonder at the both of them.