Trying Out This ‘turboai’ Thing
So, I kept hearing about this thing called ‘turboai’. You know how it is, someone younger mentions it in a meeting, you see it pop up online, everyone’s talking like it’s the next big revolution. Usually, I just ignore this stuff, been around the block too many times. But I had some downtime, figured, what the heck, let’s see what the fuss is about.
Getting started wasn’t too bad. Found their site, signed up. Looked slick, maybe a bit too slick. You know, lots of promises about boosting productivity and whatnot. I decided to throw something real at it, not just some textbook example.
See, I was clearing out some old backup drives a while back. Found a bunch of code from a project I worked on years ago. It was for a small company, we thought we were going to change the world. Didn’t quite work out that way, the whole thing went belly-up after about eighteen months. Lots of late nights, lots of caffeine, all for nothing really. Seeing that code again brought back some memories, not all good.
Anyway, there was this one piece of code, a real tangled mess that handled user login and sessions. It was brittle, hard to understand, probably my fault mostly. I thought, okay ‘turboai’, let’s see you handle this. I basically copied the whole chunk and pasted it in, told it to refactor it, make it simpler, maybe add some comments where needed.
What happened next was… interesting.
- It definitely changed things. It restructured some loops, renamed a few variables to things that made a bit more sense. That part was okay, maybe saved me an hour of tedious work if I were actually trying to revive this code.
- It added comments. A lot of comments. Mostly just stating the obvious, like ‘this variable stores the user ID’. Thanks, I guess.
- But then it got weird. It completely rewrote one section, the part handling password checks. And the logic was just… wrong. It introduced a security hole you could drive a truck through! It just hallucinated some function call that didn’t exist anywhere in the original code or any standard library I know.
I spent maybe an hour trying different prompts, feeding it smaller pieces, trying to guide it. Sometimes it got closer, other times it went off on another tangent. It felt like trying to explain something complicated to someone who’s really enthusiastic but doesn’t actually understand the core problem.
My big takeaway?
This ‘turboai’, and probably lots of tools like it, they’re fancy pattern matchers. They’ve seen tons of code and they’re good at spitting out stuff that looks like code you might want. For simple, boilerplate tasks? Yeah, maybe it saves some typing. Fixing a typo, writing a basic function template, sure.
But understanding the intent? The actual why behind the code? Figuring out the tricky bits, the edge cases? Nope. It didn’t understand the context of that old session code, the specific reasons it was built that (admittedly clumsy) way back then. All the arguments I had with my old boss about requirements… the AI couldn’t know that. It just saw code and tried to make it look like other code it had seen.
So, yeah. I tried ‘turboai’. It did… things. Didn’t blow my mind. Didn’t really solve any hard problems. Mostly just reminded me why that old project failed – we spent too much time on complicated code and not enough time on simple, working solutions. AI didn’t fix that code, and honestly, just looking at it again didn’t make me feel great either. Maybe some things are best left on old hard drives.