Wayne Woodworth

I wrote a couple posts almost nine months ago about my experience building a stable development environment. WordPress updates broke a custom plugin I wrote, and I needed to fix it. I leaned heavily on Google’s search AI, Gemini, to do that work because they aren’t things I do very often. Based on my experience back then I would say that AI doesn’t work. At least not very well.

I used the search AI because it was convenient. The AI Overview appears on top, above all of the regular search results. It’s also interactive because you can ask it something and it’ll come back with an answer. The problem is that the answers are often wrong, at least on rapidly changing technical stuff like I was doing. With it’s help I did finally manage to get through what I needed to do, but it was tedious and frustrating.

Looking Back

With the benefit of hindsight nine months on, I think the AI Mode/Gemini route was right for getting my new laptop stable. I think it would have been difficult to quickly find the answers I needed from regular search results.

On the other hand, it was not the right choice for writing the plugin. Finding one article that fully described one way of doing the coding would have been a lot better. The AI bounced around a lot from one method to another. I found that very frustrating and I never wanted to see an AI again by the time I finished. It definitely left me feeling that AI doesn’t work.

So far, this has all been experience with a particular AI, Google’s Gemini. I only have a little bit of experience with ChatGPT. I used it for a couple Spanish lessons and an old conversation about promoting my blog posts on social media. I have a bit more experience with some custom AIs in an online business coaching program. The rest of this post is about my very different experiences with Gemini and the custom AIs in the coaching program. The differences are very significant, but one surprising similarity.

If you’ve been reading along, you know how I recently updated WordPress and found that a custom plugin I wrote several years ago is now grossly out of date.

It’s broken.

When I tried to update the software I needed to revise my plugin I found that my computer, a Mac, is also grossly out of date. I shared all of the trials and tribulations I went through to get a stable development environment last time.

Here I’m going to share the same in regards to updating my custom WordPress plugin.

I shared in my previous post how I updated WordPress recently and it broke the custom plugin that I wrote several years ago. Then through updating my development setup I found that my Mac is much more out of date than I thought. I don’t want to get a new Mac because they don’t make one comparable to the one I have, so I tried a new laptop with Windows 11. But it keeps crashing. Which leaves Linux.

I like Linux. It’s open source and free to use. I tried it out once many years ago and really enjoyed it because it took me back to my college days working on Unix systems. It’s a good operating system for regular office-type stuff and surfing the Internet and it’s great for software development, especially for the web. And that’s what I need right now.

Linux runs very well on old hardware, but I’m installing it on a new HP Omen Windows 11 laptop. I’m not getting rid of Windows though. I want to make this laptop dual boot so that when I start up I can choose either Windows 11 or Linux. People do it all the time so it should be easy. Operative word being “should.”