Am I now the old guy . . .

[William Seger]

33. There's one thing that Copilot is pretty good at: software development

To repeat some of what I wrote recently in the Computer Help forum, I have a program that I wrote 25 years ago, which I still use on three websites (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). I haven't touched it in the last 5 years, but I recently needed to make a change, and I no longer had the Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment, which typically includes a code-aware editor, compiler, linker, and debugger), and the last version I had used was from 2012 (again, if it does what you need, why mess with it).

I installed the latest VS version, and it was COMPLETELY different from the last version I used. I was completely lost and couldn't get it to build from my existing project definition files, and was looking at a rather depressing amount of time to figure out why.

VS now includes Copilot, so in desperation, I decided to give it a try. I gave it my original source files and asked it to compile and build the program from scratch. I expected a rather half-assed job with lots of problems left to resolve, mainly from the large number of dependencies on other packages and subsystems I used, but I was hoping it would at least give me a good starting point with a project I could work on. It churned for quite a while, checking what it had done, finding problems in both my code and what it had just done, fixing them without any help from me, and trying again. In the end, it actually figured out all my dependencies and fixed all the problems, automatically downloading what it didn't already have, and built a working program!

Then, I needed a web server on my computer to test, which I could have done, but why bother if Copilot knows how? So I asked Copilot to enable the IIS server and configure a website with certain requirements (like installing my program as a CGI, which isn't as obvious as it used to be), and it did so with no complaints. I also needed a MySQL database server, so I asked Copilot to download and install it, then set that up an account that my program would log into, and again it did it with no help at all from me.

My program was developed to run on Microsoft systems because all of my sites were on Windows hosts, but I always wanted to create a Linux version, since those hosting services are now much cheaper than Windows. Many years ago, I spent quite a bit of time trying to do that, but with no success, so I gave up. I decide to see if Copilot could do that, and son-of-a-bitch, it did! I don't have a Linux system, so I've asked a friend to try to build and run it, but if it works, I'll be moving all my sites to Linux hosts. If it doesn't, I expect I can ask Copilot to fix specific problems.

Later, I was thinking about a web page that I have that has a lot of complex Javascript calculations. I wanted a phone app to do the same thing, so a while back I tried a program that wraps HTML in an Android app. It's basically just an imbedded browser emulator, so the HTML display worked, but I couldn't get it to run the Javascript, for some reason. It occurred to me that maybe Copilot knows how to do that, and it turns out, it's even better: It gave me the option to convert it to a native code app, and it worked! I didn't like some of the formatting it did, so I told Copilot to change some text sizes and margins and to remove some unnecessary text and buttons, just describing them by where they were on the page, and I even added an app icon -- all without me having even a foggy notion of what it was doing or how the app was actually coded, using packages I had never heard of.

So yes, this old guy was very impressed with Copilot for saving me a LOT of time. However, just this morning, I came across a good example of why it's dangerous to trust AI with things it's not very good at: checking facts and formulating truly logical conclusions. This is already a very long post, so I'll spare you the details, but in short it involved a controversy in Egyptian archeology which I have been following for a couple of years. I asked Google's AI what were the oldest known examples of Egyptian stone vases, and much of what it said agreed with what I already knew. But then, it linked to the YouTube channel of a pseudo-archeologist who is well known for making extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence. It linked to a particular video that was making a claim based only on two photos, and I now know that one of those photos had been misidentified by a London museum, and that he was making claims about the other photo that contradicted what the archeologists who did the excavation said about it.

AI is just a tool, and like all tools, results depend on how you use or misuse it. What scares me, maybe more than AI itself, is how many people don't realize that AI doesn't stand for Actual Intelligence.