How much should you share online?
2025-06-16 23:59:59 +01:00 by Mark Smith
Following on from earlier‘s rapid API development project, I‘ve spent most of this afternoon and this evening working on a much more ambitious API minimal app. I am really very impressed by the GPTs. API authentication and authorisation is a very complex topic, but Gemini knows a lot about it, and the chat interface is a great way to work on specifications. We were able to outline a very robust system that implements all the major ways you would think of presenting an API using the latest technologies and security best practices.
It‘s the sort of work that would typically take you several days of reading odds and ends everywhere, and eventually after much graft, manage to put something together. With Gemini I was able to do it bit by bit, having side conversations on every topic that needed clarifying, right then and there, and Gemini would update the working specification document. Next thing will be to try and get it to build the app. You definitely need to know a lot for this to be useful. I‘m not sure I would have made so much progress today had I not already spent years doing requirements gathering as a solutions architect, and also having built my own Saas. I already have a lot of experience implementing these type of systems.
One of the things it brings up is how much of this type of work should you share online?
I have already shared quite a bit writing today‘s blog post, and generally I have over the years been quite generous with my contributions, it‘s something that I have in the past always been a proponent of doing.
But the amount of forward motion you could give to somebody using these tools is so much more than before, that you have to wonder at what point might it become self defeating. With AI and the right way to prompt the GPTs it‘s not an exageration to say that somebody with hardly any knowledge could theorectically accomplish what somebody else spent an entire lifetime learning, in just a few hours. And even then the person that shared would probably still be called selfish by those that try to convince you that the things you do have no value.
Anyway, it‘s a strange new world. Hopefully we will find humane ways to make it worthwhile for people to share, because that‘s the only way we will continue to grow as a species. #