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mrguyoramayesterday at 5:14 PM1 replyview on HN

>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.


Replies

thorncoronatoday at 12:11 AM

Because even though I can learn some random library, I don’t really care to. I can do the architecture, I don’t care to spend half an hour understanding deeply how arguments to some API work.

Example: I rebuilt my homelab in a weekend last week with claude.

Setup terraform / ansible / docker for everything, and this was possible because I let claude all the arguments / details. I used to not bothered because I thought it was tedious.