DBSU began as a personal project with three key motivations.

Motivation 1

I am very easily distracted but need periods of intense concentration for writing. I decided that what I needed was a word processor, much like the Amstrad PCW8256 that I used to write up my undergrad essays in the late 80s. My search coincided with an era of rapidly advancing technology, with producers assuming that adding more smart technology and features was the way to my wallet. For me, less is more. The DUMB project sprang from a desire to create something that the market wasn’t offering me.  A cheap, dumb box that allowed me to concentrate.

Motivation 2

An old Dell laptop from 2013 was gathering dust in the cupboard. It isn’t good enough for today’s tools and bloat, so I wanted to understand if I could repurpose that as my dedicated portable word processor. I wondered too whether I might be able to create a conversion solution that was bootable from a USB, potentially giving a new life to the many other old laptops sitting in cupboards gathering dust? Re-use > recycle, right?

Motivation 3

My journey with computers goes back a long way. In the early 1980s I was privileged to receive a ZX81 home computer. With 1k of RAM - eventually augmented by a notoriously sensitive 16kb ram pack (sneeze and your code vanished) - programming in BASIC and hexadecimal machine code gave me a literal crash course in parsimonious coding at an early age. Jumping forward to my early working years, I leveraged my basic BASIC knowledge to use VBA in Excel to my advantage – automating a month’s work to a day. I soon realised that this DUMB project would give me an opportunity to re-engage with my latent coding skills, and to learn more about the world of coding that I’d been ignoring for 20 years.

But, but, but….

… my time for side projects is rather limited. 

As a personal project I could have done it all myself, learning the basics from scratch. But this would have taken a long, long time to get from "Hello World" to where I am now. So, to accelerate my progress towards my three objectives, I chose to experiment using CoPilot. The hope was it could help me learn and to create, explore and debug the code to develop a working prototype and a better understanding of the hardware and software issues I needed to address.

It wasn’t perfect, and we went around in many small circles. However, as the project developed, I found myself turning to CoPilot less for routine tasks and more to ask questions about coding syntax, options and so on. I won’t claim that I’ve achieved anything approaching coding proficiency, but I am now able to significantly shorten debugging processes and spot issues that the AI hadn’t got to or considered. I’m pleased to say that I don’t have to solely rely on CoPilot for BASH and Python coding anymore.

So yes, AI has been used in the development of the (quite straightforward) code for this personal project and has helped me to understand what’s going on in the new world I’m exploring. Had I set out to make a commercial product with the DUMB brand, I probably wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) have stepped on the AI path. 

But that wasn’t what happened, and I can’t go back and change that. I hope the transparency helps.