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Comment by WhiteNoiz3 | Hacker News Reader

I'm struggling to understand why an LLM even needs to be involved in this at all. Can't you write a script that takes the last 10 slack messages and checks the github status for any URLs and adds an emoji? It could be a script or slack bot and it would work far more reliably and cost nothing in LLM calls. IMO it seems far more efficient to have an LLM write a repeatable workflow once than calling an LLM every time.

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This reminds of when Adam Wathan admitted that LLMs really helped his workflow due to automating the process for turning SVG's into react components... something that can be handled with a single script rather than calling an LLM every time like you mentioned.

Sometimes people just don't know better.

That depends on the content of the SVGs.. Of course you can write a script to do a very literally kind of conversion of regardless, but in practice a lot of interpretation would be required, and could be done by an LLM. Simple case is an SVG that's a static presentation of a button; the intended React component could handle hover and click states and change the cursor appropriately and set aria label etc. For anything but trivial cases a script isn't going to get you far.

Reminds me of "XML to classes" and "JSON to classes"

Maybe the audience is not developers at all? Someone that does not know anything about computers and computation might not comprehend how easy or complex a given task is. For a whole class of people, checking a key in a json object might be as complex and difficult as creating a compiler. Some of those are in charge of evaluating progress and development of software. Here's the magic, by now everyone can understand that prompting and receiving an answer is easy.

> “For a whole class of people, checking a key in a json object might be as complex and difficult as creating a compiler.”

Ugg. I think this is me. I’m self taught (never once made a compiler in a course or class) and making scripts for ETL at work mostly from CSV input. And JSON/APIs are aggravating to me.

I’ve yet to see the Matrix in JSON data structures (Is it storage? Is it wire protocol?). I can follow _examples_ in documentation, but struggle to put parts together from Swagger or some documentation to get the data view I need. For a while I thought some kind of UML diagramming projects would do it for me—to see the Forest and the trees—but the answer was not there.

So, yes, if I can “vibe” code with ChatIA to get over the mental structural hump to make the right joins and calls, I’m all in.

https://docs.clover.com/dev/docs/making-rest-api-calls

https://api.mobilebytes.com/

> Is it storage? Is it wire protocol?

Yes.

It's just a standardised way to represent data structures in text. You can then save that text to a file for storage, or send the text over the wire for data transfer. As long as everyone involved knows they're saving/loading or talking JSON then everyone knows exactly how to read/write the data.

It is a very literal representation of (specifically JavaScript, but generally any) data-structures in text.

Right. Now the problem for me is these structures don’t come with maps. They’re also like relational databases. If you have to add the mixin calls, how do you got them all? Or know you’ve reconstructed the data model correctly? Where’s the blueprint?

> Where’s the blueprint?

A JSON Schema file that can be directly linked in your .JSON file!

But otherwise it's the same way you know anything. Documentation and trial and error

> "...otherwise it's the same way you know anything."

Not anymore. Now I can harangue ChatAI to explain it to me, and fill-in gaps in my JS knowledge at the same time.

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