Introduction
In a previous post, I wrote the following about using AI in developing my new tool include-tidy (Tidy) that uses Libclang, a library I’d never used before:
What helped a lot was using AI (strictly speaking, an LLM), specifically Google’s Gemini (because I’m too cheap to pay for Claude, especially for a personal project that I have no intention of making any money from). While I may write a follow-up blog post describing my experience, I’ll state briefly that AI saved me from having to read a lot of the documentation, read the tutorials, post questions to a mailing list or Stack Overflow, and wait for answers (if any).
This is that aforementioned follow-up blog post. If you’ve been using AI for a while, none of what follows will likely be a surprise to you. Prior to using AI for Tidy, I’d only used it for small functions or to ask corner-case questions. Using it for Tidy was my first “big” use of AI.
If this is your first encounter with my blog or me, you might be wondering “Who is this guy, and why should I care what he thinks?” I’ve been tinkering with computers for over four decades, both as a hobby and professionally. Some programmers, especially those from older generations, are pretty skeptical about AI — often referring to it as “autocorrect on steroids.” While there’s a grain of technical truth to that, it’s still pretty impressive.
