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(Double rant day)

So I had a little problem and I thought, why not test a new AI tool on it.
The problem: git-rebase, but copy tags. Example: if you apply a commit with the tag G2, create a tag called G2' in the new commit.
The tool: Perplexity. I had heard good things about it.

TL;DR: Had to do it myself.

1st it told me to do it by hand.
"What about --exec?"
Oh yeah, call a bash script to do it.
"What would the script look like...?"
Ooh, like this, look.
"Ok, I see. Can we just put it all in the command? The script can be simplified, only one tag per commit that has any, and forget the echo statements."
Yeah definitely, here you are.
"It's still complex, the script can be simplified."
Yes, I can remove some parts. Now.

Great, so now I had a single command, that would do what I wanted, right?
Nope.
- It referenced files that didn't exist.
- It had badly escaped characters in the bash string.
- And after fixing that*, for some reason Git didn't accept it, even if it was well formatted, and the AI never told me that could happen.
* Mind you, fixing that took some time of reading documentation of git commands and options I never used, snooping around what was accessible in Git's internals during a rebase, rewriting the bash lines... like, I didn't even use any part of the AI solution.

Evidently Git's very hard even for AI lol
It's neither artificial nor intelligent, it's trash. 0 stars.
(I know Perplexity is not "an AI", it was most probably using ChatGPT. Can't bother to see how to check.)
Maybe I was using it wrong??

Comments
  • 2
    I just use it as a faster Google search

    it hallucinates too much and needs too much handholding

    ---

    I had AI write simple demo things and those still needed testing and tweaks. like stuff there's a dozen GitHub repos for

    opus was pretty good though. but nobody would use it because it's massively expensive and capped. and even it has limits. at some point you run out of context window. but it made for a great philosophical back and fourth for a couple hours before it degraded. wouldn't be enough for an app but enough to figure out a semi-complex architecture or feature
  • 0
    @retoor Oh yeah, the deepsearch mode. I may have had to use that.
    The problem wasn't dependent at all on business logic. It was literally the years old "rebase a branch and take the tags" question. Even simpler, as I had just some tags and never more than one per commit.
    About learning from the AI... I didn't. In this case, any part of the given solution (if we can call it that) was rubbish. I thought it would find more info about git internal files and some stuff I had never touched... it didn't, it was as perplexed as I was hahaha
    Looking forward to being on Snek a little more. Life's been a bit down lately.
  • 1
    Ah, so you learned the trick about 'automation': https://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/... .

    /jk
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