Comment by rerdavies

6 days ago

The actual most time-consuming parts of creating software (I think) is reading documentation for the APIs and libraries you're using. Probably the biggest productivity boost I get from my coding assistant is attributable to that.

e.g: MUI, typescript:

   // make the checkbox label appear before the checkbox.

Tab. Done. Delete the comment.

vs. about 2 minutes wading through the perfectly excellent but very verbose online documentation to find that I need to set the "labelPlacement" attribute to "start".

Or the tedious minutia that I am perfectly capable of doing, but it's time consuming and error-prone:

    // execute a SQL update

Tab tab tab tab .... Done, with all bindings and fields done, based on the structure that's passed as a parameter to the method, and the tables and fieldnames that were created in source code above the current line. (love that one).

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rerdavies

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ACS_Solver  6 days ago

Yes, I currently lean skeptical but agentic LLMs excel at this sort of task. I had a great use just yesterday.

I have an older Mediawiki install that's been overrun by spam. It's on a server I have root access on. With Claude, I was able to rapidly get some Python scripts that work against the wiki database directly and can clean spam in various ways, by article ID, title regex, certain other patterns. Then I wanted to delete all spam users - defined here as users registered after a certain date whose only edit is to their own user page - and Claude made a script for that very quickly. It even deployed with scp when I told it where to.

Looking at the SQL that ended up in the code, there's non-obvious things such as user pages being pages where page_namespace = 2. The query involves the user, page, actor and revision tables. I checked afterwards, MediaWiki has good documentation for its database tables. Sure, I could have written the SQL myself based on that documentation, but certainly not have the query wrapped in Python and ready to run in under a minute.

andybp85  6 days ago

what are you using for this? one thing I can't wrap my head around is how anyone's idea of fun is poking at an LLM until it generates something possibly passable and then figuring what the hell it did and why, but this sounds like something i'd actually use.