Taking IBM BOB for a drive

I am not much of an AI enthusiast. It’s not that I am opposed to AI, it’s just that AI isn’t “Intelligent”. It takes wisdom to use a tool like AI effectively and all the gloom and doom about how AI is going to decimate the software developer ranks is overblown, IMHO. So when IBM made BOB available to take for a test drive, I decided to try something both fun and practical: Change an HTML/CSS/JS app into an Angular App.

So, it actually has been fun and productive, all my skepticism aside. But I’ll add this caveat: I know Angular and have built apps from scratch, so watching BOB do its thing meant I could see how it was building the app. Basically, I approved of the the approach, tweaking here and there. It’s a bit too “by the book” for me but it ended up creating a pretty nice app with a logical structure following Angular conventions. Nice.

I am still tweaking and playing but it created a solid foundation I can modify. So, that is where I have found value in AI, it is a tool to help me be more productive. No, it doesn’t do all the work and it’s important know how Angular works, in this particular case, but it’s not bad. I’ll most like use BOB for other projects. It gets the grunt work done so I can be more creative. There is the value….