I got a beanie! And then AI ruined it.

The Ghost team (Ryan F) gifted me a Ghost beanie! I love this thing. Well, or I loved it for the first day, until my scalp started itching, and now I'm going to love it again after I've washed it twice. (Contact dermatitis is dumb, man, but that's a separate post.)

I wanted to post a picture, but I'm not always super photogenic, and I definitely wasn't dressed up and with a nice backdrop when I tried out my beanie. So I tried out an AI image touch-up. Here's what happened. There's some funkiness going on with my teeth, but more importantly, look what AI did to the Ghost logo! Yeah, back to the drawing board. Maybe I'll have to find some make-up*, better lighting, and a friend with a camera instead...

*Hahhahaha, I crack me up.

This app also had a lower level enhancement that didn't mangle the beanie logo, but that didn't fix the background, so yeah, no. I needed something that would fix the lighting, smooth out a few wrinkles a bit, and replace the background, but that wasn't committed to destroying the logo and my teeth.

Code?

Oh, did you want to hear about AI and code? I'm currently experimenting with CoPilot. Mostly, it's fancy autocomplete. Sometimes it's wildly off topic autocomplete and a distraction. (I find it better than ChatGPT at not suggesting that I use {{helpers}} that don't actually exist in Ghost, but that's a low bar.) Sometimes it's near perfect, particularly if I'm writing JavaScript instead of Handlebars. And once in a while, when I've got a big chunk of code that's throwing an error, I ask it why, and it just magically tells me where that missing brace is, or that I've declared the variable in the wrong scope, or that my variable is actually named quotesGen not quoteGen, or whatever other dumb problem I'm having and missing. In its current form, it's never going to architect a large solution or come up with some clever hack for the functionality the client wants that doesn't exist in Ghost, but it's still a useful coding partner once I've done the higher level system design, and it's frequently faster at debugging than my rubber duck is ever going to be.

p.s. I considered titling this post "I have 1.2k ❤️ and 116 ✅ on the Ghost forum and all I got was this beanie", but I wasn't sure if that was humorous or if it risked sounding un-grateful, so I'll just leave this alternate title here in the post-script instead. I love my beanie. 😄