Employee Of The Month Award Goes To...

Drum roll please...

For the last couple of weeks I have been trying to write an application that runs on a server of mine. I decided to write it in Go because of its portability and amazing built-in standard libraries… Geek speak over.

All well and good, I got mostly there but hit a technical snag.

I spent a solid three hours searching the internet but my use-case was quite unique. Nothing. Then I turned to AI.

I asked all of the ChatGPT models… nothing.

I ran it past Gemini… nothing.

I chatted to DeepSeek… nothing.

I tried talking it through with the Replit Agent… nothing.

I thought fuck it, I will come back in a few days and have another think about it.

… a few days passed and I received an email from Google. I now had access to the new Gemini 2.0 models including the Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental modal.

This evening whilst catching up on Alone (the show where a bunch of people are stranded in the Canadian wilderness) I wrote three paragraphs explaining my conundrum.

… it started thinking … then it showed me its thought processes… then it showed me its plan for tackling the problem… then it started its research process… then it shared with me its ideas…

… then it wrote the code and showed me how to implement it.

It was a solution I would have never thought of, using libraries I never knew existed even after hours of Googling, an elegant solution that even covered situations I had never though about…

Within 10 minutes of asking the question it had spit out enough information to cover twenty pages of a Google Doc, and just short of sixty lines of code to do exactly what I wanted.

… and it worked.

Sure, I could have hired an expert Go programmer, spent days discussing the problem, and probably got a similar solution but that would have cost me hundreds of dollars and countless hours putting up a freelance job, vetting candidates, chatting, testing etc.

But the output Gemini produced gave me a deep understanding of the solution and produced code that just worked.

I really was taken aback by this.

In my second AI prediction piece I talked about treating AI as a paid member of your workforce, this was truly an example of that.

Gemini 2.0 really set the bar high here.