I am a sloperator. I use LLMs where I think appropriate. The trigger for this post is that I’d always been mildly irked that whilst the pages of the blog had tags, they weren’t clickable and were thus a little useless. So I fired up Gemini in the editor and gave it this instruction Each page has categories tags. I want these to be clickable in the browser that leads to a page listing all the posts with that tag And off it chuntered
I thought I’d have a play with Copilot to see what it could do as I maintain this blog using VSCode as it is significantly better than both emacs & vi1. I thought a nice simple task would be to add OpenGraph tags the the head of each most. It was more painful than I thought. TL;DR It finally got it right, but it didn’t notice it wasn’t reading the output of it’s own test tools and it happily made assumptions without testing them.
I’ve found a use for LLMs that I’m comfortable with. Several times I’ve found that I need to write a simple script to do something, but it’s always a grind to do. Why not get a computer to do the grind then? At home I have a NAS called luggage (named for the equivalent in Discworld, but so far the NAS has not sprouted feet) and I host git repositories there so I can easily swap between desktop and laptop without a 3rd party service.