OK, OK. AI is a handy tool.

I will admit I've been extremely skeptical of Artificial Intelligence, but this week I found that it was a really useful tool in one specific application.

I've been developing some REST API scripts for a client of mine since 2018, and one of the scripts takes a stroll through his product catalog (hosted on BigCommerce), looking for any items have disagreements between the website and his accounting system. One of the scripts has been taking over an hour to run, because for each product, it has to do a second call to BigCommerce for additional product information. In a single-threaded situation, all of those latencies add up.

I was already using Parallel::ForkManager for one of the scripts, so I thought I'd use it again for a new version of this script. Unfortunately, the new script didn't work correctly. My client has access to the repositories where I store the code, so he grabbed the code and fed it into Claude Opus 4.5. This AI produced some really helpful pointers, and I incorporated five of the six improvements.

Really, it provide a second set of eyes on my code. Colour me impressed.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

As of June 2025, Groklaw is back! This site was a really valuable resource in the now ancient fight between SCO and Linux. As it turned out, SCO was all hat and no cattle.Thanks to PJ for all her work, we owe her so much. RIP -- 2003 to 2013.

Comment on OK, OK. AI is a handy tool.

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Re: OK, OK. AI is a handy tool. by LanX (Saint) on Dec 19, 2025 at 14:16 UTC
> Unfortunately, the new script didn't work correctly. ... > This AI produced some really helpful pointers, and I incorporated five of the six improvements. I'm curious. You didn't tell us if the improvements made the script "work correctly". Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :) see Wikisyntax for the Monastery}	[reply]
Re: OK, OK. AI is a handy tool. by tobyink (Canon) on Dec 20, 2025 at 13:53 UTC
ChatGPT has actually been pretty helpful with XS coding. I've been giving it bits of Perl to translate to XS, asking it what the causes of particular compiler errors could be, why particular lines were causing segfaults, etc. The code it produces is far from flawless, but it has definitely helped. Hire me at Toby Ink Ltd or Join my OnlyFans	[reply]