[zorr]

I was skeptic about AI's writing code but after playing with ChatGPT for a bit I have to adjust my views.

I think tools like this can be great for generating skeletons and draft implementations for simple CRUD-like things. For example I asked it "write an Android layout XML for a login screen with username, password and a login spinner using components from the material library" and it did exactly that. I followed up with "write the corresponding activity in Kotlin" and it did. It generated a correct implementation, including a few paragraphs explaining how it worked and that it mocked the login method with an artificial delay for demo purposes.

Another thread that convinced me was when I gave it a Kotlin interface for a CRUD Taskrepository and asked it to write the implementation. It wrote a correct implementation backed by a Map. With some followup prompts it was able to write save/load methods to store state in a JSON file, and generate events to a Flow whenever a task was created, updated or deleted.

Another one: I asked it how I could debug why a gstreamer pipeline had a refcount of 2 after the pipeline stopped running and it pointed me to a number of debug tools and environment variables I could set to trace refs in the pipeline.