I’ve spent a lot of time banging my head against the wall trying to quickly get started with a bunch of new AI tools recently. The quickstart guides have not been so quick.
In particular, it was interesting to see the Poe team watch their quickstart get (mis)interpreted in real time at the Hackathon on Saturday. There were a few really common hiccups where people got stuck, even though it was clearly in the docs, almost every single team got stuck at the same problem and had to ask for help.
I definitely have a new appreciation for the importance of a good quickstart guide. Today I decided that we should build one for polySpectra. We started with our go-to printer: the Asiga Pro 4K.
A few lessons learned out loud:
- Cursor is f-ing amazing. (In case you missed it, Cursor was used live during the OpenAI Dev Day.)
- By using a template with common variables, we can now pretty quickly generate a new quickstart guide for any printer we support. The first one took about 3 hours, the second one about 10 minutes.
- I really think one of the most important superpowers of AI tools is making it easier for people to interact with code.
- I’m also getting into Zoom Clips, which means I don’t need to pay Loom and Zoom.