Programming

It straight made up a powershell module, and method call. Completely made up, non existent.

Counterpoint 1:

I gave Copilot a couple of XML files that described a map and a route, and told it to make a program in C# that could create artificial maps and routes using those as a guideline.

After about 20 minutes of back and forth, mainly me describing what I wanted in the map (eg walls that were +/- 3m from the routes, points in the routes should be 1m apart, etc) it spat out a program that could successfully build xml files that worked in the real-world device that needed them.

Counterpoint 2: I gave Copilot a python program that I'd written about 8 years ago that connected to a Mikrotik router using its vendor specific API and compiled some data to push out to websocket clients that connected. I told it to make a C# equivalent that could be installed and run as a windows service, and it created something that worked on the very first pass using third party .NET libraries for Mikrotik API access.

Counterpoint 3: I had a SQL query in a PowerShell script that took some reporting data from a database and mangled it heavily to get shift-by-shift reports. Again I asked it to take the query and business logic from the script and create a command line C# application that could populate a new table with the shift report data. It created something that worked immediately and fixed a corner case in the query that was causing me some grumbles as well.

These were things that I've done in the past month. Each one would have taken a week for me to do myself, and with some general discussion with this particular LLM each one took about an hour instead, with it giving me a complete zipped up project folder with multiple source files that I could just open in Visual Studio and press "build" to get what I want.

In all these cases however, I was well versed in the area it was working in, and I knew how to phrase things precisely enough that it could generate something useful. It did try and tack on a lot of not-particularly-useful things, particularly options for the command line reporting program.

And I HATE the oh-so-agreeable tone it takes with everything. I'm not "absolutely right" when I correct it or steer it along a different path. I don't really want all this extra stuff that it's so happy to tack on, "it won't take a minute".

I want the LLM to tell me that's an awful idea, or that it can't do it. A constant yes-man agreeing with everything I say doesn't help me get shit done.