[piker]

My main two attempts at using an “agentic” coding workflow were trying to incorporate an Outlook COM interface into my rust code base and to streamline an existing abstract windows API interaction to avoid copying memory a couple of times. Both wasted tremendous amounts of time and were ultimately abandoned leaving me only slightly more educated about windows development. They make great autocompletion engines but I just cannot see them being useful in my project otherwise.

[jdiff]

They make great autocompletion engines, most of the time. It's nice when it can recognize that I'm replicating a specific math formula and expands out the next dozen lines for me. It's less nice when it predicts code that's not even syntactically valid for the language or the correct API for the library I'm using. Those times, for whatever reason, seem to be popping up a lot in the last few weeks so I find myself disabling those suggestions more often than not.

[crinkly]

This is typically what I see when I’ve seen it applied. And as always trying to hammer nails in with a banana.

Rather than fit two generally disparate things together it’s probably better to just use VSTO and C# (hammer and nails) rather than some unholy combination no one else has tried or suffered through. When it goes wrong there’s more info to get you unstuck.

[piker]

To be fair though, unsafe rust (where the COM lives) is basically just C, so I totally expected it to be tractable in the same way it has been tractable for the last 20ish years? But it isn’t.

Why is interacting with the OS’ API in a compiled language the wrong approach in 2025? Why must I use this managed Frankenstein’s monster of dotnet? I didn’t want to ship or expect a whole runtime for what should be a tiny convenience DLL. Insane

[charcircuit]

I had the opposite experience. Gemini was able to work with COM and accomplish what I needed despite me never using COM before.

[tonyedgecombe]

I've done a lot of work with COM over the years and that is the last technology I would trust to an AI. It's very easy to write COM code that appears to work but contains subtle bugs.

[piker]

That was my issue. Integration works, Outlook itself not so much, afterwards. (I.e. memory error.)

[piker]

Actually hadn’t tried Gemini with it yet. Perhaps worth taking a look.