[PLUG] More AI Comments

[Casey Bralla via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

I confess to being pretty cynical about AI ("There's no 'I' in 'AI' ").  To me, it was kind of like the talking dog:  It wasn't so remarkable for what it said, but that it could speak at all.  But lately I've been putting it to good use and have (somewhat) changed my mind.  I now feel it is a very useful tool.  And just like some tools, it can go horribly wrong and/or misused to bad effect.  But also like tools, it can make someone MUCH more productive.

Lately, I've been working on a distributed temperature/humidity sensing system for my home.  It's a combination of wireless Arduino Nanos, SHT-31 sensors, and an FTP server that collates the data and presents it on a web page.  This means I've had to use Arduino code, python, Apache configuration, HTML, and CSS.  I"m somewhat familiar with them all, but far from proficient in any of them.

Here's how I used various AIs:

• Write basic code snippets that I can assemble into larger programs.  This is especially helpful since I don't remember all the syntax and structural details of these various languages.  This has tripled (or more) my code-writing speed.
  
• Debug my programs and tell me why various parts of them don't work like I expected.  I can often copy and paste the entire code into the AI and it will (usually) identify my mistakes.  This is better than having someone else review it because the AI review is more thorough, and it's less humiliating for a computer to point out the blindingly obvious mistakes I've made.

Dave Plummer just published a good video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AJoByRGkgU&t=424s) on which AIs are best at various tasks.  Here's what I've been using:

• ChatGPT.  Good for overall coding and presenting suggestions for improving the code
• Grok.  Disappointing.  Lots of output, but it never seems to be very helpful.  Often talks about what "should" work.  Probably better for current events since it seems to be tied to X.
• Gemini.  Not bad.  Can present links to data sites.
• Perplexity.  I don't use this much.  Good for web search
• Claude.  Dave loves this one the best, but I haven't used it much yet.

I would love to hear other's opinions and conclusions about using AI in Linux work.

Casey

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