Lately – I always wanted to start like this, looks so professional :p – I have been playing around with VS Code and Copilot. Vibe coding, right?
It’s fun, I have to say. I felt like I had superpowers. I am the senior developer who can code in any language. Well, not me, the copilot, but okay, I’m doing the prompt, so I can take a few credits.
Alright, the first one goes nicely. An easy way to compare things from one Excel sheet to another. I could have done this in Excel, “googling” some stuff, or even ChatGPTed it, but it was cool seeing it get one pretty fast and with Python.
I got the grasp of it. Let’s do something else. Real deal automation.
Here’s one case: On the website I work on, some of the portfolio company links can change, and we won’t know it happened. Maybe the company updated its website, and we were not informed. So, why don’t we build a scraper to test it from time to time?
Here we go with Copilot building a Python app with “Claude Sonnet”. I did a bit of research on Google to pick the right library to use, specifically for web scraping. Puppeteer showed up.
Everything else was prompted by Copilot with OpenAI. Success, the app was working nicely. I helped get the HTML and do a bit of setup and debugging, but the goal was really to code near zero. Even adjustments were done via Copilot. Worked nicely, but required various interactions.
I don’t know why my agent function didn’t work in the first place ( you have 3 options in Copilot – Ask, Edit and Agent). So I was using the ask one all the way. Because of that, I guess, I could see lots of garbage code or useless code, like never used. At some point, it would rewrite things that were ready as well, breaking the entire code.
Lucky me, Claude Sonnet 4 becomes available on Copilot, and the fun takes another level. At the moment, I am building (I am a bit subjective :p) an application that will support our editorial team in finding relevant articles on the web that they can write their Op-eds.
Here’s what the app can do:
- Look for specific terms
- Look for portfolio companies defined by the journalist
- Look for news on specific media outlets
- Present the latest articles
- Provide the ability to read the article and use GPT to rewrite the article using our branding tone of voice – using the OpenAI API
- The article is rewritten and translated into Arabic
Hope to get the code public soon on GitHubWith that, we aim to help the efficiency between 50% to 80% – at this stage, it is 50%. The other 50% requires human interaction. And why is that? Because things will break. And the AI will say it was broken. Something the AI just created.
As much as this is really incredible – like a bot coding for you – to me, who has seen scary things in development, that you can prompt and start building an application from the ground up. Yet, with all the advancements…
my opinion is that we are at 50% – as much as AI does a lot, 50% is still needed from us.
And with time, obviously, this number will decrease. I hope that it decreases because AI is advancing and not because we are becoming lazy, accepting bad stuff, and offloading even simple tasks to chatbots and agents of the world to do them for us.
Interesting article about the subject here: https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school