[timschmidt]

It turns out an awful lot of precision (plenty for many things) lives in library and web APIs, documentation, header files and dependency manifests. Language can literally just point at it without repeating it all. Avoidance of mistake through elimination of manual copying in things like actuarial and ballistics tables was what the original computers were built for.

[stingraycharles]

Custom written code can also point at those APIs and libraries without repeating it all? Or am I missing your point?

[theshrike79]

API Glue is the easy and boring part in programming. Nobody really enjoys wiring API A to API B, combining the results and using API C to push it forwards.

Any semi-competent AI Agent can do that with a plan you've written in 5 minutes.

[skydhash]

I would love to see an AI try to make sense of GTK API.

I may be wrong, but it seems when people are talking about easy glue code, they’re talking about web services API, not OS API, not graphics or sound API, not file formats libraries,…

[pydry]

Even with web services it usually shits the bed if you ask it to maintain something with tech debt.

[theshrike79]

I used Sonnet 3.5 over a year ago to decrypt a notoriously shitty local government API to get data out of meetings, votes and discussions.

I know it's a piece of shit API done in the worst possible way on purpose (they don't want openness, but had to fulfill a law that mandates "openness") because I had previously tried to do it manually - twice. I ran out of whisky before I got anything done.

Sonnet _3.5_ almost one-shotted it with just the API "documentation" they had and access to Python and curl.

People have also hooked stuff into proprietary APIs on "smart" devices with zero documentation, just by having an Agent tirelessly run through thousands of permutations to figure it out.