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Harnessing Artificial Intelligence (AI) has many benefits like saving time, automating tasks, and giving you more time to be creative, and AI tools are used in a wide variety of contexts for various tasks.
In this episode of Igniting Change, our dynamic duo, Kev and Tom, are back with the ultimate AI challenge, combining the internet's love for cats with innovative AI tools.
Will it be a success? Will our AI overlords be taking over? Find out below…
But first, a quick disclaimer!
This experiment was recorded less than a month ago and the AI times are already changing! Although Kev and Tom used Cursor for their test, WindSurf is now recommended as the best tool for AI Coding. This space is developing incredibly fast, but that's even more reason to jump in and try new things.
Tune in!
The hilarious highlights:
Why “furry egg” was the key to image success,
How AI hallucinated a deep-fried cat drumstick,
What worked (hello, Cursor) and what broke Tom (hello, webcam integration),
Why AI is a brilliant assistant—but you still need the human spark!
AI Cat Avatar Maker Challenge
“What was the challenge exactly?” We hear you ask.
Well, Tom has some mild beef with AI. His experiments so far have been a bit of a mixed bag. So Kev came to the rescue to try help Tom with a challenge to explore the AI horizon.
The task was to make an avatar generator, but it had to use AI tools as much as possible and had to be completed within a day’s work. That’s six hours! Think about AI image generation, think about AI code generation, think about fixing bugs with AI, and even more.
Blending AI's potential with the internet's love for cats, pushing the tools (and Tom) to the limits, all while documenting the process for Kev and Tom’s reflection and for your viewing pleasure.
“I've got a challenge for you, Tom. I want you to mix AI and cats and I want you to build a cat, kind of like a persona maker, avatar builder, using AI tools.”
Kev Borrill, Web Team Lead, 3 Sided Cube
The Challenges of AI Image Generation
It wouldn’t be a challenge without some challenges.
Bringing Tom’s creative vision to life proves to be hard. Especially when using multiple AI tools leaves a lot of scope for things to not quite go as planned. But this means that this episode is packed full of learnings!
Adobe firefly
Introducing the sidekick for generating images. ChatGPT and DALI have image generation capabilities, but Tom wanted to try something new. Adobe firefly is great at straightforward tasks, benefitting from being effective and easy to use. This also helped Tom manage the time constraint of this task! However, the more niche the desired output, the more tricky it gets to use Adobe firefly.
ChatGPT
Prompts were proving tricky, so ChatGPT was called in to wrangle the prompts. Talking the same language, from one AI to another!
“At one point, I used ChatGPT to write prompts for Adobe firefly and that worked better.”
Tom Yeadon, BED Team Lead, 3 Sided Cube
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Exploring AI Tools for Development
For this stage of the challenge, Tom relied on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Cursor to improve his productivity when coding. But there’s a catch!
The most important takeaway from this stage was the importance of providing AI tools with context. Context is key to enhancing the effectiveness of AI tools as it can significantly boost productivity. Although, they aren’t the one, silver ullet, solution, AI tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Cursor have great potential when integrated effectively.
ChatGPT
Speaking of our good friend ChatGPT, Tom described it as the ‘Swiss army knife’ for this challenge. He was able to ask questions, get different ideas, and even some advice! In terms of coding, however, ChatGPT had its limits. Although it was a good fall back when Cursor wasn’t quite working, there were instances where ChatGPT still wasn’t the full solution. For example, it was able to recommend using a ‘good library’, but then couldn’t actually use it itself!
Cursor
Cursor is specialised! It is a development environment programming tool that is enhanced with AI. This means it can predict, enhance and auto complete parts of code for you. It was not all perfect, but Tom admits that he might not have been using the tool to its full potential.
Tom was hoping to rely on Cursor to work on some ‘webcam stuff’, Cursor had no idea what it was doing and started making things up. But it can become quite powerful with the right setup and understanding. When it could accurately predict what Tom was going to do next, it worked well!
“I've since learned that there are different ways to configure it. You can do different models and different predictions, and also I think it behaves differently for different languages.”
Tom Yeadon, BED Team Lead, 3 Sided Cube
AI as a Development Tool
Don’t worry! AI is not coming for your development job any time soon. There’s no denying that AI can assist in software development, but human developers are still essential for decision-making and ensuring high-quality. Synergy is the solution for success!
Using AI to assist in software development has both potential and limitations. Kev and Tom discuss how AI tools such as jQuery libraries and the Cursor IDE provide valuable assistance but still need careful checks because of outdated resources.
AI is the most beneficial to people who already have the foundational knowledge needed for tasks. As we see in this task, developers remain essential for decision-making and ensuring the code's functionality and quality.
AI Development Challenges and Successes
Here’s a quick, top-level, summary of what Kev and Tom learnt from the task:
Image and prompt generation is hard, so having effective prompting skills is very important.
AI tools struggle with integration and coherence when it comes to complex projects.
Collaboration between humans and AI tools is key!
AI tools can help a lot with specific tasks.
The challenge was a success!
Want to learn more and hear the details? You’ll have to tune in to the episode for yourself.
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Improvements and Feedback
The future looks bright! Kev and Tom share an optimistic outlook, both for the cat avatar generator and the use of AI tools.
While it can be tricky to refine the output of AI tools, there is potential for further AI assistance in refactoring. But AI’s unpredictability definitely calls for the ongoing need for human guidance to steer AI-driven projects in the right direction.
Watch out for a potential version 2.0 with even more avatar options, a UX and design overhaul, and exciting new features like drag-and-drop capabilities, animations, and QR codes to share your Purr-sonas with friends..
“That's the next part. Maybe this is the podcast part two, maybe a little shorter one, where we do some updates using AI to improve how it looks, the UX of it, but just try and use more AI tools around this there are more and more AI design tools.”
Kev Borrill, Web Team Lead, 3 Sided Cube
Join the conversation
You can try the avatar generator here!
Tune in to the full conversation on your favourite podcast streaming platform and via Youtube!
For more things Igniting Change, check out our podcast page, or shout us a holla to get in touch with us. We would love to hear from you 💚
Published on 3 April 2025, last updated on 3 April 2025
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