this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The generally unhelpful attitude of the community aside, I don't think these one-of-a-kind problems lend themselves to AI very well.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What makes you think that? Just yesterday I asked "how can I make an excel file in X language?"

GPT-4 suggested two libraries, one popular but not maintained, the other new(ish) and maintained. It told me how to install the latter and provided sample code for a simple hello world spreadsheet.

I was then able to ask for a few tweaks, like sending output to stdout instead of to a file on disk, and using 4,2 cell coordinates instead of D2 coordinates. It was able to tell me how to tell Excel that "4 Feb 2042" is a date value, not a string value, make the heading columns bold, make the column widths automatically calculated based on the content, etc etc.

The whole think was so one-of-a-kind I doubt you could find questions to all those answers (especially with a specific library) on the regular Stack Overflow and even if they are there it'd be a dozen separate questions that I'd need to piece together.