From ZX Spectrum to AI: Getting My Time Back
I’ve never really thought of myself as a “coder.” But somehow, I’ve always ended up reading, tweaking, or writing bits of code to automate things, fix something, find something, remove something, install something.
There’s something satisfying about it. When code works, it feels like you’ve brought something to life.
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My first experience with code goes all the way back to the 1980s.
My brother and I had a ZX Spectrum 48K, complete with its awkward rubber keyboard. We spent hours typing lines of code from a book that came with the computer. When our first program finally ran, it displayed an ASCII-art mountain range with twinkling stars overhead. A series of beeps played a tune that transported us to some distant cowboy trail in Oregon where, inevitably, we’d die of dysentery.
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There was no “save” button back then.
Everything lived in memory. Lose power, and you lost everything. That meant every session came with a mix of excitement and anxiety, excited to see the final product and anxious that something would interrupt us before we could get it to run and we'd have to start again, in the future, from scratch.
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For the past few months, I’ve been working with ChatGPT. Yesterday, I connected Codex to Visual Studio Code and gave it access to my website files, along with a simple request:
“Can you help me add a blog section to my site using my existing styles, and leverage available included services that my hosting provider offers.”
The first solution was basic: edit PHP files locally, upload manually. It worked but it wasn’t ideal so I refined my request
“Can you develop a dynamic blog page that uses available database technology provided by my hosting provider?”
It built it, in just over 7 minutes, it looked up services offered by my hosting provider, created a database schema, built a reusable database connection Generated a blog listing page, Created a single-post page updated my existing files - Checked its own work for errors
Then it told me exactly what I needed to do to finish.
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About 30 minutes later, the meat machine is much slower than the digital one, I had setup a database and uploaded the new blog page and I had a working blog connected to a database.
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Before AI, this would have taken me months to build. I would’ve been digging through forums, reading documentation, watching videos, asking questions, and waiting (sometimes days) for someone to respond and help me get unstuck.
With AI, and my slow typing (I have the hands of a plumber), less than an hour and I had an 80% solution.
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But what I am really starting to appreciate is what AI gives back.
It accelerates everything, the same acceleration that makes people uneasy about AI. It challenges jobs, systems, even entire industries. But at a personal level?
It gives me something incredibly valuable: time. Time to spend with family. Time to learn something new. Time to do things that actually matter.
Tonight, AI gave me a small piece of my life back.
And that might just be the most practical silver lining, after all, time is the ONLY tangible universally accepted currency.