[LASR]

More than a decade ago, I wrote a parser for Google Sketchup object files. It was part of some computer graphics assignment. We were not supposed to write parsers, but instead manually write out a 3D model vertex by vertex and then texture map them. I instead decided to write a parser and build my model in Sketchup.

It was a TON of fun doing that. And I learned a lot from that exercise.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago I "wrote" a parser / serializer for handling knowledge-graphs as input/output between my app and LLMs.

I used ChatGPT to walk me through the whole thing. It did very good job of converting between mermaidjs and an object type I defined in typescript. It wrote the code, the unit tests - the whole thing.

I don't understand how it works. The code is great. But not as satisfying.

[samus]

> We were not supposed to write parsers, but instead manually write out a 3D model vertex by vertex and then texture map them.

Good grief. It's like writing assembly: a good exercise, but only for trivial or particularly tricky parts of a program. For everything else, proper tooling (a compiler or a 3D modeler) is the way to go. I fully agree that the best learning experience is to build tools to automate away the annoying parts :-D