Tag: AI

AI is just a tractor

Many people seem existentially worried that AI will replace us. Or, worse, somehow transcend us. Make us irrelevant. 

I’m not so sure. 

Technology has always been about augmenting and multiplying human effort. 

A sole human with a hand hoe can cultivate about 0.04 acres of land a day. Give that human a pair of oxen and they can cultivate between 0.5 – 1.3 acres per day… a 10-30x improvement in productivity. Give that human a steam plough and it’s 20 acres a day. A modern tractor: 40-75 acres a day.

The tractor didn’t transcend the human because it was orders of magnitude stronger, more capable or productive. It augmented and amplified what that human can achieve.

AI – and LLMs especially – feel different because they don’t augment our physical ability, but our cognitive ability. It’s new territory and it’s scary. But it’s still just a tractor – for thought, instead of soil. It’s a “tractor for the mind” (to paraphrase Steve Jobs). 

And we’re still in the driver’s seat.

August 26, 2025 Add Comment

Use ChatGPT to remove Malware from a WordPress blog

I had been neglecting this blog for a long time, and in my neglect, the WordPress version got way out of date, SSL certificates expired, and then it got hacked. It was FULL of Malware. By the time I realised, the site was full of spam content and links.

A fresh install of WordPress on the server got rid of the most malicious stuff… but my database was now also full. Every single row in my wp-posts table had malicious scripts inserted.

There are plugins available on WordPress that will scan your site and remove malware for you, but they all cost cash… upwards of $150.

I knew I could write a script that would clear out the malicious content but my php is VERY rusty, and I hated writing regular expressions even way back at Uni.

Enter ChatGPT. ChatGPT gave me a perfect php script, and then turned that script into a WordPress plugin that I could upload to WordPress and activate and run directly. I eyeballed the script – it looked fine, so I installed the plugin and ran it. (I had created a backup of my database just in case of course!) In the blink of an eye, my site was clear of spam.

The prompt was simple:

I need to remove malicious <script> tags from thousands of WordPress posts. Write a wordpress plugin that will iterate over every row in the wp-posts table and remove any inserted <script> tags. Provide instructions to install and run the script.

This could save you a few hundred bucks of expensive Malware removal tools!

July 26, 2025 Add Comment

AI-powered usability testing

I’ve been playing with “Vibe Coding” tools like Lovable and Cursor a bit lately to see how they can help Product Teams prototype, test and validate ideas quicker.

Meanwhile back at the office we’re running a series of moderated usability tests on a new web product at the moment, which got me thinking: are there already LLM-powered tools to run usability tests? If there aren’t, that’s a startup idea for someone for free.

It turns out, of course someone has already thought of this:

Our system features a Persona Generator module, an LLM Agent module, and a Universal Browser Connector module to automatically generate thousands of simulated users to interactively test the target website. The system also provides an Agent Interview Interface and a Video Replay Interface so that the UX researchers can easily review and analyze the generated qualitative and quantitative log data.

So soon we’ll have websites built by LLMs, that are then usability-tested by LLMs, then deployed by LLMs.. and then used by LLMs (agents).

It reminds me of the joke about email summary AIs: my AI turns my bullet points into a full email which I send to your AI, which then summarises it back into bullet points…

July 18, 2025 Add Comment

Product Requirements Documents with ChatGPT

ChatGPT is quite good at creating PRDs.

All good PMs have a good PRD template that they start with, but using ChatGPT to create a PRD for a new idea, feature or product accelerates the process 10x.

Try this: go to ChatGPT (or Claude or whatever) and type in:

I want to create a web app prototype to validate an idea.
The idea is a web-based app to do <your idea idea>. Create a Product Requirements Document to cover this prototype.

What you get back isn’t perfect… but it’s a great tool for helping think through the problem and what might be required to solve it. It will give a quick sense of feasibility and complexity and help identify gaps in your thinking that you need to solve.

July 18, 2025 Add Comment