A Little Context
My main problem with cooking (apart from a near phobia of handling raw meat) is the timing and sequencing really stresses me out. I worry constantly about getting it wrong and over/under-cooking some component. It takes any pleasure out of cooking. I see other people enjoy it but for me unless it is something I know really well, I’d rather sit an exam.
Why My Bonnet Is In The Garden
(long post ahead)
A Roundabout Story
For a while now, my car gets grumpy when it gets hot. In stationary traffic it gets hot, the fan kicks in and it becomes a bit of a struggle to keep it running at idle as the engine goes lean. I assumed it was to do with the engine ingesting hot air coming out of the radiator as under bonnet temperatures get quite high when the fan is running1
Sloperator
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
Confident Idiot
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 probably could have done it myself in a similar time if I hadn’t got up at 4:30am today to give my daughter and her boyfriend a lift to Luton Airport2
Scripting with duck.ai
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. All these repos live as bare repos in an imaginitively named directory called git