Jira And Fun AI Art

 I'm working on a Saturday, making some substantive changes to one of my more complicated Jira projects at work. In the process of the redesign, I'm building some helper classes to simplify recurring tasks. I'm chatting with AI (read: ChatGPT) as I go.

AI taught me the value of using a Map<String, String> over a List<String>. It was quickly obvious that the code would be far more readable, if a bit more verbose, with the Map. This is important as my full retirement date approaches.

That date is June 5, 2028, by the way. 737 days, 5 hours and 26 minutes from now, not that I'm counting.

Anywho, I complimented AI on the good idea and told it I planned to use the Maps instead of the Lists.

Got it. The List<Map<String, String>> is more readable for code maintenance. Once I'm retired and living with Bobby Lee, Basil, the General, Cat, Miss Elizabeth and Miss Claire, the whippersnappers coming after me will find readable code.

The last thing Cat wants is to have our lives interrupted by frantic phone calls from GenX programmers.

AI replied:

Cat would regard that as a catastrophic systems failure.

In Cat’s ideal world:

• Readable code
• Stable abstractions
• Clear semantics
• Centralized formatting
• Minimal surprise

so that no one calls the bayou at 2:13 AM saying: “Mr. Bond, we can’t determine whether Base Fee means percentage or currency in module RCCFundingFormatterV2Final_Actual.”

At which point Cat silently presses the large red button.

No one wants that. No one.

I laughed and gave it this prompt.

Generate an image of the old, southern man sitting up in bed, on a phone call, half asleep while in the background, the large, gray tabby cat is angrily preparing to press the big, red button.

Here's the result. It's worth a click to see the full screen version.

I love the details it added in without a prompt. It turned me into a much older version of my fictional character, Bobby Lee Bond. Bobby and I are both partial to bourbon. I was surprised by the choice of Old Forrester instead of my favorite, Elijah Craig, but the detail was clever. Dittos for the text throughout the image as well as the Bayou Command map.

AI forgets, blurs and blends its memories, but it gets the spirit of the thing close enough to almost always make me smile. I got a kick out of this one and I hope you did, too.