How to Talk to a Computer: Part 1
For my partner, talking to a computer is almost as instinctive as talking to you or me. Put simply, it's a skill he's built up over many years, and a lifetime of being interested in computers. Not me though. I was the arts and craftsy one, the reader, the teen who learned to knit because I thought it would be fun to make my own clothes and learned to juggle because I loved seeing other people do it. I learned best by talking to other people, by watching them do things, by asking mountains of questions.
Millennials and younger generations are mostly considered to be digital natives, and I do just about fit into that category! When I was growing up I loved TV, and it was a treat to play on my friends' computer games, but other than a 1st gen Game Boy (that I was definitely a bit addicted to) I didn't have much interest in computers.
I got my first phone aged 17, the golden age of the Nokia brick. It definitely took me a while to get used to texting, muddling my way through lol - no, it doesn't mean "lots of love" - and so on. Actual emojis (rather than thoughtfully placed punctuation) would've seemed futuristic to me. I did use a computer in school, but we were rarely asked to produce work on it, and it wasn't until I went to university that I got my first laptop.
The technological changes came thick and fast then. I went to uni with a stack of floppy disks, the oversized highly breakable item you had to have spares of in case the one you saved that all important essay on got corrupted somehow. By graduation the USB stick was everywhere and people were inviting me to things via Facebook, rather than just talking to me in person.
Technology and I didn't get on particularly well together for a while; I used a computer willingly to write essays, but I still took all of my notes by hand and preferred a highlighted photocopy and a curated list of handwritten essay plans before my thoughts made it to the computer. My first smart phone was an iPhone 4, though I would have to admit that I've never looked back from having a phone since.
"Just ask the agent to make you an app" says my partner, incredulous that I wouldn't know how to do this. "But how do I talk to a computer?" I reply, slightly petulantly. At first I try to talk to it in its own language however, since I have a very very basic knowledge of HTML at best, this doesn't really work.
The interesting thing about living with an engineer is you become very familiar with technical terms and phrases, but you have no idea what they mean or what the context for them is. I have spent many years (he was an early adopter) listening to talk of LLMs, APIs, concurrency, onboarding and far more things than I can think of right now, though crucially I don't know what any of them actually mean. I occasionally ask what's that, I learn something in the moment, and promptly forget it all again a few days later.
So when I try to use technical language to describe the thing I want the AI agent to do, I find myself at sea. I don't really know what I'm talking about, and it's confusing the issue. How can I break down the barrier that I feel is always there, between me and my computer? How can I get it to do what I want it to without breaking something? Without stubbornly refusing to work… until my partner comes along and does exactly the same thing as I did five minutes ago, and then deciding to play ball?
