alt Hacker NewsMaybe the internet has made me too cynical, and I'm glad people seem to be having a good time, but at time of posting I can't help but notice that almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what, exactly, is being coded. Still better than the breathless announcements of the death of software engineering, but quite similar in tone.
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I am currently using a Claude skill that I have been building out over the last few days that runs through my Amazon PPC campaigns and does a full audit. Suggestions of bid adjustments, new search terms and products to advertise against and adjustment to campaign structures. It goes through all of the analytics Amazon provides, which are surprisingly extensive, to find every search term where my product shows up, gets added to cart and purchased.
It's the kind of thing that would be hours of tedious work, then even more time to actually make all the changes to the account. Instead I just say "yeah do all of that" and it is done. Magic stuff. Thousands of lines of Python to hit the Amazon APIs that I've never even looked at.
In the past month, in my spare time, I've built:
- A "semantically enhanced" epub-to-markdown converter
- A web-based Markdown reader with integrated LLM reading guide generation (https://i.imgur.com/ledMTXw.png)
- A Zotero plugin for defining/clarifying selected words/sentences in context
- An epub-to-audiobook generator using Pocket TTS
- A Diddy Kong Racing model/texture extractor/viewer (https://i.imgur.com/jiTK8kI.png)
- A slimmed-down phpBB 2 "remake" in Bun.js/TypeScript
- An experimental SQLite extension for defining incremental materialized views
...And many more that are either too tiny, too idiosyncratic, or too day-job to name here. Some of these are one-off utilities, some are toys I'll never touch again, some are part of much bigger projects that I've been struggling to get any work done on, and so on.
I don't blame you for your cynicism, and I'm not blind to all of the criticism of LLMs and LLM code. I've had many times where I feel upset, skeptical, discouraged, and alienated because of these new developments. But also... it's a lot of fun and I can't stop coming up with ideas.
The other week I used Copilot to write a program that scans all our Amazon accounts and regions, collects services and versions, and finds the ones going EOL within a year. The data on EOL dates is scraped from several sources and kept in JSON. There's about 16 different AWS API calls used. It generates reports in markdown, json, and csv, so humans can read the markdown (flags major things, explains stuff), and the csv can be used to triage, prioritize, track work over time. The result is deduplicated, sorted, consolidated (similar entries), and classified. I can automatically send reports to teams based on a regex of names or tags. This is more data than I get from AWS Health Dashboard, and can put it into any format I want, across any number of accounts/regions.
Afaik there are no open source projects that do this. AWS has a behemoth of a distributed system you can deploy in order to do something similar. But I made a Python script that does it in an afternoon with a couple of prompts.