this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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I spent maybe 90 minutes trying to get ChatGPT to write me a fucking AppleScript or bash to copy all calendar events from a source calendar to a destination. That shit does not work.
It won't do that well. What you have to do is ask it to help you leverage your existing development skills in an unfamiliar domain. I used it to help me write a python program to authenticate, pull and filter data from a GCP firestore database and create an XLSX with summary and detail sheets.
I've never used Python before in my life. It took me about 4 hours. Of course I've been doing that sort of thing in Java for many years. Turned out I wrote that faster in Python than I could in Java. Configuring the connection to that database in Python was so simple compared to Java.
The stuff it wrote was sometimes incomplete or wrong in subtle ways, but I could see the bits that didn't make sense which helped me focus on those things and ask better questions to help me figure it out. I think the last hour was just me tweaking stuff by myself because I didn't need help with it by that point.
I needed about 30 minutes to do a python application from scratch that took linear JSON data files, merged them and presented them as a tree in a GUI.
Before that I had barely done anything in python, basically could do a basic function declaration with a simple operation and nothing else. I even didn't have a lot of experience with UI at all.
But like you I had experience with java and such, and those skills transfer. All it took was searching basic syntax/related code examples and required library imports. And I mean basic, search engine search, not AI answers.
All I'm saying is, I really don't think AI is providing anything a lot more efficient than doing a good old crawl through API docs and stack overflow. So the fact it's using tremendous amounts of resources to maybe achieve a 10% efficiency boost is bothering me a lot.
There’s also the fact that
Now, these things could both change over time, but humans are much more efficient to train than current state of the art probability sieves we call GenAI.
It's only assuming if you aren't specific enough. And you do know their training is usually a year or two or 3 old. So they don't know about whatever new shit your trying to work with.