I had a bunch of PDF files with coded file names, like ABC-123-abc-999-001.pdf, where each section of the file name was meaningful. Inside the PDF were several form fields. I needed to insert records in a database for each of the 97 files. Easy, but tedious.
I prompted it with a description of the file name breakdown, where the text to grab was in the PDF, and then asked for a Python program to find the files (in subdirectories), extract the PDF text, and write a text file with the SQL Insert statements for all the files.
It took two or three minor iterations, but less time than it would have taken me to write from scratch because my Python is rusty. Regular expressions, PDF processing libs, file system traversal, and SQL generation, and it all compiled and worked from the start (the iterations were to tweak a few things I didn’t specify).
This is the kind of thing that I think is perfect for these tools. With the new tools that let the LLM compile and execute code, it will be cool (and potentially dangerous).
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This one was using Bing AI chat:
I had a bunch of PDF files with coded file names, like ABC-123-abc-999-001.pdf, where each section of the file name was meaningful. Inside the PDF were several form fields. I needed to insert records in a database for each of the 97 files. Easy, but tedious.
I prompted it with a description of the file name breakdown, where the text to grab was in the PDF, and then asked for a Python program to find the files (in subdirectories), extract the PDF text, and write a text file with the SQL Insert statements for all the files.
It took two or three minor iterations, but less time than it would have taken me to write from scratch because my Python is rusty. Regular expressions, PDF processing libs, file system traversal, and SQL generation, and it all compiled and worked from the start (the iterations were to tweak a few things I didn’t specify).
This is the kind of thing that I think is perfect for these tools. With the new tools that let the LLM compile and execute code, it will be cool (and potentially dangerous).