The Chasm: The Shape of Unfinished AI Codebases

Jimmy Millerprojectspostsadventtalksgithub It's 2 am. You've stayed up all night trying to get your program working. You finally figured out that one bug. The singular thing stopping you from running your new program end to end. The relief! You have accomplished something incredible. The next day, still feeling the high from this sense of accomplishment, you go to show your loved one the program you've made. After breaking a world record for the number of caveats and hedge words a single sentence can contain, you show them a few flashing words in a terminal window. The glaze passes over their eyes. Your accomplishment, however great it is, is simply that, yours. No one else is going to understand. Understanding What is Done# This style of progress is one of the big barriers that I've seen keeping people out of programming. Countless teaching tools have been made that try to circumvent this problem, to give learners something that they can see as a big accomplishment and that they can…