Lately, I’ve been diving into the world of artificial intelligence, having long refused to engage with what I assumed was mostly hype and nonsense.

My day began, like many, with a bit of doom-scrolling through Reddit to see what fresh hell the current administration had delivered to everyday Americans. Somewhere in that scroll, I stumbled across a post about Suno AI music. As a lifelong music lover, curiosity took over.

Suno impressed me immediately. I used minimal input, a song title and a style, and selected a male vocalist. Moments later, the result was genuinely jaw-dropping. It’s no surprise an AI-generated country band managed to score a number-one hit this summer.

On a camping trip a few days later I played the song for a younger friend who was just as impressed. He asked if I’d ever tried ChatGPT. I hadn’t, but that quickly changed.

After downloading the app, I put it to the test. I’d already committed to giving a presentation on medicinal plants to our Master Gardeners group — a subject I knew a bit about from pharmacognosy class back in pharmacy school. ChatGPT turned out to be right about 85% of the time, which was impressive on its own. What really hooked me, though, was what came next. After answering a question, it asked if I wanted an image to illustrate the results. That’s when I became a fan. For me, the most time-consuming part of preparing a presentation has always been designing engaging PowerPoint slides.

Just a few days ago, I was talking with a twenty-something at a social gathering when the topic of ChatGPT came up again. He mentioned using it to help write software, which struck a nerve. I have a large Android codebase sitting idle because I’d never been able to migrate it from Eclipse to modern Android Studio. The official Android documentation is nearly incomprehensible — it might as well be written in Chinese — and earlier attempts using the import tool built into Android Studio went nowhere.

So, I updated Android Studio to the latest stable version and asked ChatGPT how to convert my old Eclipse development stack into something Android Studio could read. The process is painfully complex, but ChatGPT walked me through it step by step and double-checked my work along the way. After four solid hours, my old source code finally loaded. Of course it immediately crashed when I ran it.

This time, though, Gemini — now fully integrated into Android Studio — stepped me through the necessary code changes until the app ran again. There’s still plenty left to do, but I am aiming for a January 2026 release.

At this point, calling it “AI Santa Claus” doesn’t feel like much of a stretch.

Addendum: I’ve since learned that Sam Altman, the owner of ChatGPT, and one of the creepiest looking techbros, and who once called tRump “terrible”, now says the orange turd is a “breath of fresh air”. I can no longer support ChatGPT,