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I feel exactly the same way - a few years ago I was lamenting the fact that I was writing JSON serialization/deserialization code for the 1000th time, and begging for a tool that could automate it for me. I haven't tried ChatGPT for that specific task just yet, but I'm pretty sure it's exactly the solution I had in mind.


I mean this sounds much more like a job for tooling and higher level meta-programming. If “everything but X” is identical busywork, then just automate the “everything” part. Using AI to generate code seems equally bad for maintenance and possibly worse for silent errors.

That said, there is a lot of busywork in programming, especially refactoring, adding parameters and stuff like that. Sometimes it’s ok to have such work be “mostly correct”, eg if you have strong type safety and unit tests to catch minor errors.


The thing is, with code you mostly do want the verbose output, with a prescription you do need the output to follow an official format, etc. Tools like these seem to fill a niche where you know what you want, but the target format/process is onerous.




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