Re: re: AI is a good tool when used in the appropriate hands
Just the other day I use ChatGPT-4o to write a simple Python tool. The prompt was (roughly):
> "Using Python write a tool that generates a Windows toast notification when a new serial port is connected to my system. The tool should run in the background and not require any user interaction once started."
I have a lot of serial ports on my system and going into Device Manager was a chore to find which one I had just connected. (Lots of FTDI cables, for anyone familiar with embedded systems.)
It created that tool in 30 seconds and it worked perfectly first time.
Could I have written the tool myself - absolutely. And I expect such tools are available online - but IT policies would mean I would need to get approval to install anything. So this saved me time. Instead of spending 10 minutes writing it, looking up how to generate 'toasts' on Windows, how to use pyserial to find the newest serial ports connected, I used a tool which has that information in its training data set and can generate the answer in seconds.
Would I use it for any serious production code? No. Would I use it for anything where I couldn't give the code a good look over and make sure it isn't doing anything bad? No. But it's absolutely brilliant for small, well-defined tasks.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
