Hi all,
I do code on my own without AI, but in all honesty, I’m not that great (I’m a junior dev at my job, and don’t have a lot of experience). I always use AI to explain things to me, not code for me. I made that my mission, so I don’t let it think for me because I want to learn. It explains things very well and I’ve been learning a great deal.

Today, I decided to test it out. I asked it to build an app for me that works on KDE Plasma, my favorite DE.

I use some appimages for some apps. I tried appimagelauncher and gear lever and had some issues with them.

I want to integrate appimages into my system. So, I did a small workaround where I created a small script in ~/.local/bin that has one line after the shebang exec /<path to app image>/<appimage>. Then created a .desktop file that points to that script. I made one for Suyu and VIA and they both worked. I wanted to do it for more apps, but it got repetitive, so I gave AI some requirements and told it to add what’s necessary if needed.

I’ve never programmed in Python, and it chose Python. lol. Ok, let’s go with it. It made a pretty nice app. The app does 5 things:

  1. Creates that little script I mentioned earlier
  2. Creates the .desktop file for that app and makes it point to the correct things (script, icon, startupWMClass(this is so the app will still launch after pinning it to the panel)…etc)
  3. Copies the appimage into a “appimages” folder in the home directory
  4. Adds an icon of your choosing to the app
  5. It makes everything executable

I had it package the app into an appimage (that’s something I’ve never done before and it was pretty freaking cool to learn) and I’m planning on making an .rpm and a .deb packages of it, too.

The honest part. I feel a tiny bit of shame deep inside. But then I look at it and I see an app that could help some people. Who cares how I created it? I have always wanted to contribute something to the Linux world, and this feels like it.

What I’m asking for: your honest opinion. Should I feel that little shame? Should I put it up on GitHub? It would of course be GPL licensed. Maybe some folks want to make it better or contribute or fork it. I love open source and I feel like this could be useful to some.

So, hit me.
Thank you

  • chickenf622@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    5 days ago

    You learn so much more doing it yourself instead of having AI write code for you. When I first learned how to admin an Apache server I had 0 understanding how it worked, but with some effort I’m now confident enough to do a simple setup on my own. I did follow along with tutorials and examples configs, but I made sure I knew what each part did at least on a high level. The reason I’m confident in this is that I know how to read the docs and how to troubleshoot issues when they happen.

    When you let AI do all the work you don’t learn the inner workings of a system and are only hurting yourself. If you want to use AI use it for writing some boiler plate you’ve already written hundreds of times or taking simple functions and converting them to another language. I use AI for basic and repetitive tasks, which is something it’s great at. I don’t use it for making large design decisions since that will (not “if”, but “will”) bite me in the ass later on when something breaks. Examples of good uses of AI (in my opinion): generating a list of US states in JavaScript, take a function that converts a strijg to a date object and try to translate it to another language, use it as a tool to bounce some high level ideas off of when you’re at a development block.