alt Hacker NewsI have a bunch at work, yes. Can't publish them.
Just an hour ago I "made" one in 2 minutes to iterate through some files, extract metadata, and convert to CSV.
I'm convinced that hypothesis is true. The activation energy (with a subscription to one of the big 3, in the current pre-enshittification phase) is approximately 0.
Edit: I also wouldn't even want to publish these one-off, AI-generated scripts, because for one they're for specific niches, and for two they're AI generated so, even though they fulfilled their purpose, I don't really stand behind them.
Replies
>Just an hour ago I "made" one in 2 minutes to iterate through some files, extract metadata, and convert to CSV.
Okay but lots of us have been crapping out one off python scripts for processing things for decades. It's literally one of the main ways people learned python in the 2000s
What "activation energy" was there before? Open a text file, write a couple lines, run.
Sometimes I do it just from the interactive shell!
Like, it's not even worth it to prompt an AI for these things, because it's quicker to just do it.
A significant amount of my workflow right now is a python script that takes a CSV, pumps it into a JSON document, and hits a couple endpoints with it, and graphs some stats.
All the non-specific stuff the AI could possibly help with are single lines or function calls.
The hardest part was teasing out python's awful semantics around some typing stuff. Why is python unwilling to parse an int out of "2.7" I don't know, but I wouldn't even had known to prompt an AI for that requirement, so no way it could have gotten that right.
It's like ten minutes to build a tool like this even without AI. Why weren't you before? Most scientists I know build these kind of microscripts all the time.
Who's the third? I'm assuming OpenAI and Anthropic are 1 and 2.