in reply to Is ChatGPT like having a thousand monkeys?

Here's an example where ChatGPT shines. I just saved about an hour and a half by asking it this:
I'm serving over HTTP a potentially large document of "Content-Type: text/plain". I want to create a javascript interface that loads the first 100K of the file, then as the user scrolls to the bottom it loads the next 100K and so on. The javascript can use jQuery if needed. I'd like the page structure to have one scrolling div with an event tied to the scroll that triggers loading the next portion. There should be a div below that which appears as part of the document text with "..." content if the document is not fully loaded, and it should display a spinner beside that any time the ajax is in progress. There should be a div at the top that states the size of the file, how much has been loaded, and a small button "load all" that loads all remaining text. The javascript should be configured with a simple URL (of the document) and DOM node (parent for it's generated nodes) and use HTTP byte range requests to fetch from that document.
ChatGPT 4o:
Here's a full working example of the JavaScript interface you're describing. This implementation uses: You can drop this into a page and call initLazyTextLoader(url, parentElement) to attach it.
(etc etc)

Now, regular JS developer may have only saved 20 minutes, but I'm rusty on all the jQuery API and DOM API and HTTP range requests and would have gone a bit slowly as I look up all those details.

Then I saved another hour when I decided to restructure the page:

Instead of jQuery, can you write this as an ExtJS 3.4 Component?
ChatGPT 4o:
Absolutely! Here's how you can implement this as a custom ExtJS 3.4 component, using only ExtJS classes and APIs (no jQuery). This component:

Then, I lost 10 minutes as I came here to post about it :-)

Ext.ns('MyApp'); MyApp.LazyTextLoader = Ext.extend(Ext.Panel, { url: '', chunkSize: 100 * 1024, // 100 KB autoScroll: true, border: true, layout: 'border', initComponent: function () { this.loadedSize = 0; this.fileSize = null; this.isLoading = false; this.isFullyLoaded = false; this.statusBar = new Ext.Toolbar.TextItem('Loading...'); this.spinner = new Ext.BoxComponent({ html: '<div class="spinner" style="display:none;"></div>', style: 'float:right;' }); this.headerBar = new Ext.Toolbar({ region: 'north', height: 30, items: [ this.statusBar, '->', { text: 'Load All', handler: this.loadAllRemaining, scope: this }, this.spinner ] }); this.textBody = new Ext.BoxComponent({ autoEl: { tag: 'pre', cls: 'lazy-text-body', style: 'padding:10px; white-space:pre-wrap; font-family:monosp +ace;', html: '' }, region: 'center' }); this.footerEl = new Ext.BoxComponent({ region: 'south', height: 30, autoEl: { tag: 'div', html: '<span class="ellipsis">...</span>', style: 'padding:5px;' } }); this.items = [this.headerBar, this.textBody, this.footerEl]; MyApp.LazyTextLoader.superclass.initComponent.call(this); this.on('afterrender', this.onAfterRender, this); }, onAfterRender: function () { const el = this.textBody.getEl().dom.parentNode; Ext.fly(el).on('scroll', this.maybeLoadMore, this); this.fetchChunk(0, this.chunkSize); }, updateStatus: function () { let msg = `Loaded: ${this.loadedSize} bytes`; if (this.fileSize) { const pct = ((this.loadedSize / this.fileSize) * 100).toFixed(2) +; msg += ` / ${this.fileSize} bytes (${pct}%)`; } this.statusBar.setText(msg); }, showSpinner: function (show) { const spinner = Ext.fly(this.spinner.getEl().dom).child('.spinner' +); if (spinner) spinner.setVisible(show); }, fetchChunk: function (start, end) { this.isLoading = true; this.showSpinner(true); Ext.Ajax.request({ url: this.url, method: 'GET', headers: { 'Range': `bytes=${start}-${end - 1}` }, callback: (options, success, response) => { if (success) { let data = response.responseText; if (!this.fileSize) { const rangeHeader = response.getResponseHeader('Content-Ra +nge'); const match = /\/(\d+)$/.exec(rangeHeader); if (match) { this.fileSize = parseInt(match[1], 10); } } const el = this.textBody.getEl(); el.dom.innerText += data; this.loadedSize += data.length; if (this.fileSize && this.loadedSize >= this.fileSize) { this.isFullyLoaded = true; this.footerEl.hide(); } this.updateStatus(); } this.isLoading = false; this.showSpinner(false); } }); }, maybeLoadMore: function () { if (this.isLoading || this.isFullyLoaded) return; const el = this.textBody.getEl().dom.parentNode; const scrollBottom = el.scrollHeight - el.scrollTop - el.clientHei +ght; if (scrollBottom < 20) { this.fetchChunk(this.loadedSize, this.loadedSize + this.chunkSiz +e); } }, loadAllRemaining: function () { if (this.isLoading || this.isFullyLoaded) return; const remaining = this.fileSize ? this.fileSize - this.loadedSize +: this.chunkSize * 10; const end = this.loadedSize + remaining; this.fetchChunk(this.loadedSize, end); } }); // You can use it like this: new MyApp.LazyTextLoader({ renderTo: 'text-loader-root', height: 500, width: 800, url: '/path/to/your/large-file.txt', title: 'Lazy Loaded Text File' });

Epilogue:

Actually, the code above has a few bugs, the main one being that the 'afterrender' event of the parent component runs before the child components have been rendered, and can't be used to apply event listeners. (to be fair, seems like a terrible design decision on the part of ExtJS) The correct solution is to put the event on the child component's afterrender event. But, I needed to do a few more iteration of the idea, and got annoyed that ChatGPT kept making this mistake even when I told it about that problem, so I moved over to Claude 3.5 and *that* one got it right on the first try. Though, I made things more complicated and then it generated a bug as well, but it was fairly easily fixed. It's still a time-saver to automate the boring mundane code and not have to look up all those APIs.