What I'm working on : StarWars Browser

[adrianhall]

While I'm waiting this week, I thought I'd share what I am working on a little bit.

I've been working with GitHub Copilot and how it can be used to generate code without actual coding. I wondered how good it would be in producing a set of projects that synchronize multiple linked entities through offline sync. To do this experiment, I am not writing code - I'm allowing the AI (in this case, Claude 3.7 Sonnet) to do the work for me. I gave it a project proposal and a couple of longer prompts to get the work started.

It is taking a long time. If you are thinking "hey - the demos say you can create a game in 15 minutes!" - I'm calling bullshit on that. Thus far, It's been churning for four hours and has only gotten to generating all the models, relationships, Aspire AppHost, PostgreSQL schema, DbContext, and entity type configurations. I also needed to provide much more "discussion" to direct the requirements and code being written. At times, I was itching to "do it for the AI" because it was slower than I could type the same thing - but that would have defeated the experiment. Several times, I got rate limited by Anthropic.

One great hint - write your prompts as markdown before copy/paste into the GitHub Copilot chat window. It allows you to send a bigger prompt (which is normally required for this type of work) and ensure you have an awesome copilot-instructions.md file for your project (which you place in the .github directory at the root of your solution). Also, VS Code is ahead of VS in the copilot space, so using VS Code is better for this.

That being said, Copilot and "vibe-coding" will get you about 80% there in approximately 20% of the time. This allows you to concentrate on real problems rather than mundane coding, so it's a definite improvement.

Let me know if any of you want to see the final project (which will include prompts, instructions, and all the code that is generated).