I recently took over a software project that had, from both an engineering perspective and a usability perspective, outright failed. The code was a teetering tower that had collapsed in on itself into a pool of leaked abstractions and interdependent logic.
I find myself using LLMs for coding in 4 specific ways:
The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time; try breaking up the expression into distinct sub-expressions
This is an error you will see often if you develop SwiftUI in Xcode. Know what it means? It means the compiler has given up, and you're on your own. The error points to a file and function, but the issue could be anywhere in your codebase. It might be a simple syntax error, or it might be code that is "too complex" for the compiler. Hopefully you commit frequently because Xcode has turned into Notepad until you figure it out.
I have long since come to appreciate the value of writing scripts to avoid someone else (or future me) from having to re-learn and re-solve problems, but something about it has always bugged me.
I am automating a process, but I'm also documenting it, and those two things struggle to coexist.
One option is to write a bash script for the automation and a markdown file for the documentation, but they inevitably end up duplicating information and/or getting out of sync. The other is to just have a single markdown file with a bunch of inline bash that you manually copy into a terminal. But "running" it is clunky, tedious, and easy to mess up.
mkdir -p $(dirname $0)/data; cd data
print_messages() {
clear
cat $(ls -tr | tail -n30)
printf "\033[31m$USER:\033[0m "
}
export -f print_messages
watchexec 2> /dev/null -- bash -c "print_messages" &
while read text; do
printf "\033[31m$USER:\033[0m $text\n\n" > "$(uuidgen)"
done
I recently learned something that blew my mind; you can run a full desktop Linux environment on your phone.