ChatGPT Killed The Coding Stars... Or Not Yet?

Last days, I've fallen down a rabbit hole of my own making.

I've been so caught up that the time I was supposed to dedicate to writing my newsletter ended up consumed by it. One of many tasks waiting on my to-do list.

You’ll shake your head, muttering, "What a waste of time!". You’ll think that the opportunity cost was too high. That the ROI on this investment of time was negative.

Was it?

I don’t know. I'll let you decide for yourself.

Every month I receive a report. Without getting too technical, it’s a Excel with data from 3 solar projects located in a cluster.

The thing is, my Excel is US configured. Dates read as MM/DD/YYYY.

This configuration causes me headaches when reading and exporting the data.

Is it a matter of changing my Excel configuration? Probably.

Do I want to change my Excel configuration to the DD/MM/YYYY standard? No, I don't.

So, every month, I spend some time to manually convert the data to US format.

It's not a lot of work, but it is manual labor. And in the age of AI, it bothers me to have to do some braindead work that a machine should be able to complete in no time.

Giles and Myles from Full Stack Modeller would argue that this is a job for Power Query. While I tend to agree, I have a bias towards Python.

And since ChatGPT is such an expert coder, I decided to ask it to write a Python script for me. A script that would read through my Excel file and convert the data from DD/MM/YYYY to MM/DD/YYYY.

What a piece of cake, right?

A piece of cake, my a$$.

Although at first glance the task looks simple, a chat with ChatGPT in natural language hasn't been enough to get the job done.

As it turned out, the devil is in the details. My spreadsheet has quirks that require deeper thoughts and considerations.

What's my point?

I have read numerous posts on LinkedIn and Twitter claiming that English is the new programming language. That with the advent of AI, you just have to express your needs in your own words, snap your fingers, and AI will translate your instructions into perfectly written code. That you no longer need to learn how to code to create your own scripts.

I don’t know about a few years from now. From my own experience, we're not quite there yet.

I have spent many hours trying the AI-generated code to get this task done. I have broken the process into the smallest steps possible to facilitate the task for the AI. I've modified lines of code here and there to get it working.

And yes, ChatGPT does the heavy lifting.

But you have to be on top of it. Understand whether the code generated makes sense. Make some changes, tweak some instructions.

Without some working knowledge of Python, I couldn't have completed this task.

To top it all, after so many hours spent I consider the task to be completed, but it’s far from the perfect solution I was after.

And... what do you think? Has it been a good investment of my time?

Speaking of investments... if you need a financial model to check whether your investment makes sense, hit reply and tell me in natural language what your needs are.

Financial modelling services.

P.D. If you are curious about one of the many chats I had with ChatGPT to get this bloody task completed, you can take a look here.

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