Automation
I just described prototype code as code to be thrown away. On that topic…
I’ve been observing how people are programming with large language models and I’ve seen a few trends.
The first thing that just about everyone agrees on is that the code produced by a generative tool is not fit for public consumption. At least not straight away. It definitely needs to be checked and tested. If you enjoy debugging and doing code reviews, this might be right up your street.
The other option is to not use these tools for production code at all. Instead use them for throwaway code. That could be prototyping. But it could also be the code for those annoying admin tasks that you don’t do very often.
Take content migration. Say you need to grab a data dump, do some operations on the data to transform it in some way, and then pipe the results into a new content management system.
That’s almost certainly something you’d want to automate with bespoke code. Once the content migration is done, the code can be thrown away.
Read Matt’s account of coding up his Braggoscope. The code needed to spider a thousand web pages, extract data from those pages, find similarities, and output the newly-structured data in a different format.
I’ve noticed that these are just the kind of tasks that large language models are pretty good at. In effect you’re training the tool on your own very specific data and getting it to do your drudge work for you.
To me, it feels right that the usefulness happens on your own machine. You don’t put the machine-generated code in front of other humans.
