Vibe coding an XrmToolBox Tool part 5 - From the ashes, comes a new tool

In my last post, I talked about how not knowing something could lead to disaster and for me it did. For the most part, this experiment started as a way to teach me more and see if something like this was possible. But I'm not a proper developer, I don't want to waste someone's time with something silly, however, in the real world, where maybe you are working in a team and you have others around you, you would absolutely work with other developers to fix the code. You would also have source control and backups, but lets not talk about that part.

It made me think, now that I have built the tool with prompts alone, could I rebuild a new tool faster. The answer, yes!

I started a new project and used the same template to give me a good jumping off point and then prompted the the main functionality of the tool. But I put a lot of effort into my old tool, I don't want to have to have to prompt all those things again, but I still have that old project and code so 🤷

OK, I copied and pasted all the code from the main plugin file into Copilot and asked it to use that code to extrapolate all of the functionality from the code and apply it to the new tool. To my surprise, not only did it work, it worked really really well 😱 And behold, Flow Solution Finder is dead, rise Flow Finder!

Within a couple of hours, I not only had a new version of my tool, but it looked better and functioned better. The copy and paste of old code was not perfect, some minor tweaks were needed here and there, but it was a fully functioning tool, rebuilt in a fraction of the time it took to build the first one.

This is also the part the scares me though. The code was created for me and I had access to it, and sure the LLM is trained on lots of the internet, with code samples and general code, but what if I hadn't written this code?

With little to no experience, I could take open source software, copy and paste it, ask Copilot to tweak it and then I could pass it off as my own without credit, or even sell it. It's not too far from someone who actually knows what they are doing, then doing this, but the fact there is a tool that can basically do it for me, for anyone...I wonder if we will see a rise in people doing this or fewer open source projects. Gen AI images being used in movies, art, video games has all risen in recent years and the artist who own or who have "inspired" the content, are not credited and don't get compensated...but we now seem to be able to do this with code...This requires some further thinking.

Anyway, now that the tool is back, time to add source control and again, working inside of Visual Studio, it can connect to GitHub natively and works with Copilot, which I would expect, I am using GitHub Copilot after all 🤷

A quick prompt and it generated a new repo for me in my GitHub and my VS gave me some easy directions for making changes and committing code.

This means I should hopefully mean that even if I break my code again (BTW I have since learnt easier ways to update things, this is a learning experiment), I can pull my latest working code from my GitHub so I have a backup. In hindsight, I should have done this from the start, but I wanted to have something semi ready before creating a GitHub repo. This is your sign to make your repo now!

Now that I have the backup, it's time to really test and tweak the tool. I noticed a few things like the Default solution appearing in lists, or something called the active solution. I also wanted names to disappear from lists once they are added to things, like solutions and co-owners, so that this needed to be distinct.

Several prompts later and we've now added those features. But I'm looking through a lens of, this is what I want, this is what I am building, I wonder what others would think. This led me to beta testing phase.

Ciao for now!

MCJ