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Mini Experience Report

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Daniel Worthington-Bodart edited this page Feb 19, 2024 · 2 revisions

I wanted to give a mini experience report on building a tool by pairing with AI (in this case mainly ChatGPT 4 + a little Copilot).

The tool is very niche and not very interesting for 99% of the world but I thought the experience report might be more interesting to people.

I paired with ChatGPT for the following:

  • Write the code (first in Go, then later I rewrote it in bash - the Go never got checked in)
  • The README (docs)
  • The logo design.

I'd estimate I spent about 4-5 days over evenings and weekends, it was at the very least a 50% reduction in my work load but possible as high as 75% of the text was written by ChatGPT. (there were a lot of iterations didn't get committed)

Overall I'd estimate the project was about 2 weeks worth of work. COCOMO model thinks it's more like 2 month (see scc report below) or about $7k

I did write a LOT of prompts to get the result I wanted. (The chat transcript is 2700 lines long of request and response with code etc -see other page). Debugging with ChatGPT most of the time was excellent, even if 50% of the issues where created by ChatGPT in the first place, but then the speed of code output was close to 90% faster: think I'd write a sentence or two, past in some previous code and maybe an error message and then with a second or so I'd get back an answer. Then I'd normally iterate 2-3 to get the answer I really wanted (not introduction unnecessary complexity / dependencies etc)

Lines of code

$ cloc . --exclude-dir=.idea
       6 text files.
       6 unique files.                              
       2 files ignored.

github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.90  T=0.00 s (1269.6 files/s, 94459.4 lines/s)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                      files          blank        comment           code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Markdown                          1             52              0            137
Bourne Again Shell                1             24              0            107
YAML                              2              4              0             38
Dockerfile                        1              3              0              7
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                              5             83              0            289
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Project Cost estimates:

$ scc
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Language                 Files     Lines   Blanks  Comments     Code Complexity
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
YAML                         2        42        4         0       38          0
BASH                         1       131       24         1      106         18
Dockerfile                   1        10        3         0        7          2
Markdown                     1       189       52         0      137          0
gitignore                    1         2        1         0        1          0
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Total                        6       374       84         1      289         20
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $7,337
Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 2.12 months
Estimated People Required (organic) 0.31
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