A year ago I used AI to help me build a website that showed cinema listings out of frustration with cinema websites.
(Seriously, what is up with cinema websites? I just want to know what films are on on a given day in cinemas I can reasonably get to. Instead I have to decide either which film I want to see first, or what cinema I want to go to, meaning I have to navigate about 80 pages before I have the information I want. And then I forget what showings I had seen two minutes ago.)
My AI-assisted build was ugly and clunky (it was a hook that triggered a shell script that got the data from the site and put it in a temporary sqlite db, then plain-text output it to the HTTP response – yes, I am that old). But it kinda did the job. After a while it got subject to bit rot, stopped scraping successfully, and I stopped using it and forgot about it.
Tonight I resuscitated it and one-shotted a professional-looking but simple site that still gives me the information I wanted (and more – it added useful stuff like plot synopses and ratings) in 5 minutes. It works perfectly, and I don’t even know what tech it used.
Nothing new in that – one-shotting a useful site now feels old hat now that we’re firing a large chunk of employees because AI.
What it make me think was that everything is an API now.
I don’t need to interact with that annoying cinema site anymore (except to buy tickets, though it’s tempting to automate that as well…). I can just point my harness of choice at it and tell it to give me the interface I prefer.
Everything is an API now. Think of that, and what it means for a software engineer now!
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