Author: Andy Novick

I’ve written software since 1971. Since the mid-1980’s I’ve heard that a new computer program is going to write the code from now on instead of programmers. That’s left me with skepticism about what AI might do. After spending time with them, here are a few early impressions.

AI can write working code

I started in March of 2025 coding with the chatbots. The CLI and VS Code based tools were only beginning to appear. But given a fairly simple problem in writing SQL the chatbots were able to produce working code. ChatGPT and Gemini were able to write some code but Grok went past that and found a bug in the code it was give to to adapt and fixed it. Now all the foundational models are good at code. The harnesses, like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and JetBrains, have taken that further and are very good at it. I documented that experience here:

Testing still matters

The AI tools are confident even when wrong, so testing matters more than ever, not less. The good news is that debugging skills are still useful. However, I’m working on some projects were I’ve not looked at the code and have interacted with the AI by doing my own testing and then going back and requesting changes like a typical user might.

Image Generation Isn’t so Great

Given the logos of Gemini, Grok, Claude, and ChatGPT, I asked each:

Using the four logos provided make an image for the theme of AI-Assisted coding. Include a few lines of code somewhere in the image, maybe in the backround. Make sure to produce a square image.

The results were pretty bad. They all butchered at least two of the logos. Most of the output wasn’t square. The image at the top of this post is from ChatGPT and here’s a try from Grok.

If you’re exploring the same territory, I’d love to compare experiences.

I’ve tried to keep up with what AI makes possible. Here’s a rundown of the projects I used AI for during 2025.

T-SQL coding with AI

In March, I decided to see if AI would write T-SQL, the programming language of SQL Server. None of the programing tools were geared to SQL, I used an AI chat interface. I created a scenario for a Simple ETL project somewhat similar to projects I have been doing for my consulting client. Grok did the best job and even found and fixed a bug that was in the prototype code I had hacked together. Pretty impressive and I did a YouTube about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7eHQKerVMk The code is published on GitHub here TSQL_Codegen1

Book Review of CO-INTELLIGENCE: Living and Working with AI By Ethan Mollick

This was posted on Linked-in. I wrote the review myself with only grammar and spelling help from AI. It got more attention than I expected. Here’s the review.

Writing books for my granddaughters

I wrote two books for the granddaughters, ages 7 and 4. The first one, Saving the Constitution, coincided with a trip to New Hampshire for the Independence Day holiday. It was about the two of them as teenagers living in Philadelphia on July 4th, 1776. They had to help Thomas Jefferson complete the wording to the Declaration of Independence. ChatGPT helped with the writing, story line, and pictures. AI struggled to keep maintain consistent character appearances across illustrations, but the results were still acceptable. The Papa Andy character came out looking like Ben Franklin in one picture and like a 40 year old farmer in another. The girls loved it.

Later in the summer when I had a plan to turn a freezer box into a rocket ship for them to play with, I wrote Astrid and Frieda go to Mars. Now in early adulthood, they had to travel together to Mars to deliver the first human born on Mars. This time I think I did a better job of prompting and the story and pictures were more consistent. ChatGPT’s Studio Ghibli style had just come out and that worked very well.

Tech Support

This is a lifesaver. I’ve been using computers for 55 years, mostly as a developer. While I have extensive programming experience, my knowledge of technical environments such as cloud services, Linux, and networking is more fragmented. Now I get technical support as good as Neal, who supported the last office where I spent a lot of time. He’s very good, for a human, on the topics he knows like Windows, networks, and storage, but he doesn’t know every topic. Grok and Gemini seem to know all topics and lay out step-by-step instructions to solve each problem or implement each new function. They make mistakes and are willing to correct them, just like Neal. Unlike Neal, they won’t do the implementation for me. Maybe next year.

Trip Planning

My wife and I took two trips out west this fall the first in October to Utah and the second in November to California. Gemini was key to making our trip to the parks in Utah very special and very easy. The key was laying out the route: Zion, Bryce Capital Reef, Arches, Canyonlands, Monument Valley, and Page, which has Horseshoe Bend and the slot canyons. Then it helped us fill in the details for each day. If felt similar to the personalized service we once received from old-time travel agents. If you’re thinking of a trip, don’t fail to ask your AI for help.

Cookoff1

We hosted the annual Christmas party for four families who share German traditions. To make it fun, this years party included a cooking contest. Cookoff1 is a Python web app built with Flask, developed in PyCharm and it’s AI tool, Junie. There are three pages: Setup, Voting, and Results. I ran it on my desktop machine and exposed only to the home network. The users got connected with either their phone or iPad and entered their votes. I brought up the results page on the living room TV for the big reveal. You can see it in the GitHub repo.

NoSave

This is a small windows app with a single multi-line textbox written in C# using Visual Studio 2026 Community Edition and GitHub CoPilot. It never saves text pasted into it. I use it as a place to paste passwords so that they’re not in the clipboard history. Windows can save a history of clipboard strings, but that leaves you vulnerable to another unrelated app grabbing them, So I’ve turned that feature off. I could use Notepad to save a password for a few minutes, but that gets saved, sometimes across reboots, so I don’t use that. NoSave just holds the password. It includes a feature to discourage screenshots, though it isn’t fully reliable. NoSave is a work in progress, there is no public repo yet.

Daily News Summary

After cataract surgery I found it uncomfortable to read the newspaper (Wall Street Journal) with any set of reading glasses, so I decided to try something different. I canceled my subscription ending a 60-year habit of reading newspapers, going back to forth grade. For about 6 years I also delivered the Standard Star, New Rochelle’s newspaper. I replaced the paper with e-mail subscriptions across the political spectrum: from CNN and Axios to The Hill and Just the News, and read them in the morning. They newsletters duplicate each other so it became a bit tiresome to read them all. I decided to try getting a news summary using Gemini. Using the chat interface, at 6:30 AM and 5:30 PM it reads my Gmail account for the day’s news and produces a pretty reasonable summary of the ten most important events. I instructed it to cite each source used for each summary, and it did so. Then it started sneaking in other sources, with citations. I’ll have to address that in the prompt and I’ll be adding summaries for AI news, sports, and business/investment news next year. Or, I could just read the Babylon Bee.

In-app AI

In the second half of 2025 many applications have introduced AI assistants, and I’ve been taking advantage of them. Photoshop is one. Removing people where I don’t want them is fantastic. Masking the sky without spending 10 minutes building a precise mask! That’s amazing. I love it. The photo club I belong to isn’t as excited and it’s been the subject of some new rules about contest submissions. I’ve also used the AI in Word, Excel, Notion, and several other programs. I’m hoping my tax prep software will include an AI assistant next year.

More Chats

I did lots and lots of chats this year. I made pretty good use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, and occasional use of Perplexity and Claude. For me, chat has replaced most search. I expect it to continue to do so next year.

2026?

What’s ahead? More programming for me. I’ll flesh out the news app and NoSave into more useful tools. I’m going to devote some time to research topics, such as diet and metabolism, using NotebookLM. Writing some more is on the table. I’m not sure about what. I’ll try and find a technical SQL with AI topic to present.

I listen to some AI enthusiasts like Moonshots and Nate B. Jones on YouTube. They’re telling us that AI is on an exponential curve that’s going to make it more intelligent at an increasingly faster pace than in 2025. AI has changed faster and faster and now the rate of change is increasing. Second derivatives to the moon! Will we get our robots? Maybe full self-driving? Hold on to your hat!