Using the right tool for the job

Boy howdy am I learning a lot about robots, about what kind of capabilities the robots have, and how absolutely maddening they can be to use, if you are using the wrong one. Which has really been my experience using both Copilot and ChatGPT for more “advanced” task, like creating an advanced application that generates audio narration from Power Point speakers notes using Elevenlabs, for example.

You can go prompt after prompt and get into a real rhythm and knock out some serious work! Until, who knows why, they suddenly get into what I call a ‘dumb loop’, where you request something, and it says it’s going to do the thing as soon as you ask, so you ask, and it tell you it will do the thing after you ask, and so on. This happened to me frequently in both Chat and Copilot. I tightened up my asks quite a bit, and I would still get this.

Then, for coding, everything is going great, until a row is 3 spaces off, or there is an extra comma. Those are the things that take hours to resolve. I had an issue like this yesterday with Voxsmith. It was a regression that potentially messes up animations in Powerpoint. Spent over 7 hours yesterday with Chat and Copilot, and neither of them could correct it, even after I showed both of them the code where it worked in a previous version.

So, I switched to Claude. On the free version, I uploaded my app files, it did code review, I said bug report and in 3 revisions it got it right. Actually 2, but the third I was being pedantic. Call it 20 minutes. My mind was blown!

I signed up for a paid account immediately (and cancelled my ChatGPT paid account) and it did not mess around, getting to work right away with code clean up a complete UI refresh and a bunch of bug fixes. This was done in less than 8 hours total!

This post was going to be my first Voxsmith demo. If I’m honest, I’m really glad everything fell to shit on Monday with Chat and Copilot; then I wouldn’t have found Claude and wouldn’t have made the progress that I have made, because now I think I am using the correct tool for the job