Using LLMs for coding

This post looks at the context for some of my thinking about AI for supporting software development, and where I’ve landed on it for the time being.

The landscape

I briefly wrote about ChatGPT’s coding ability at the end of 2022. The wide availability of this tool marked the beginning of what I think can fairly be described as a revolution. The controversies that have crystalised since have not dampened my amazement of this step forward in what compute can do, especially around natural language processing.

How to Have Cooler File Icons in VS Code

I watch a lot of programming demos on Youtube, and it’s been low key bugging me for a while that everyone has cooler little icons in the explorer view of their VS Code than I do. For example, they have the HTML 5 shield logo next to their index.html, but I have the little fragment tag <>. Really, there was no point spending two hours customising my OhMyZSH! terminal if I’m just going to let myself down with disappointing VS Code file icons.

New Project Routine

I have a sort of muscle memory for starting little web projects now. I seem to have landed on node/express SSR apps with HTMX sprinkles. So it goes a bit like this:

• Create a working directory - all lower case with a simple, but unlikely to be duplicated by me, name.
• Open the directory in vscode
• npm init in the directory to create the package.json
• create a public sub directory, and drop htmx.min.js in there, and create a styles.css there. I’m always conflicted about what to do about this htmx dependency. I’d rather host it rather than use their CDN because reasons . But I also feel bad about committing it on Github. I could .gitignore it, but then when I clone the project on the production server I’d need to add another step to download it. HTMX is only 44K, and Microsoft can afford the bandwidth, so for the moment I commit them, but I need a better solution for the future.
• using the git tools in vscode, add .DS_Store to .gitignore (which also creates it), then edit it to also ignore node_modules
• npm install express
• npm install ejs
• create a server.js, and add the hello world code
• create a readme.md
• commit these files as “initial”
• Create the repo on github with the same name - no readme and no licence. I do it this way for a couple of reasons - I want to find out at this point if I’ve already used this repo name, and I want it to give me the cut and paste commands to push the repository.