On 17 Jun 2026, Sean Dennis said the following...

I've found Copilot to be good for my needs. It's super helpful when dealing with several things. I use AI as a tool and that's helpful for me. Good for deep Web searches.

I find them especially helpful for the random PowerShell or Bash commands when you need something in particular.

I always try and do it myself first just to make sure I can, then I paste what I've come up with into one of these chat bots and usually come away amazed at how efficient the code it spits back is. What I was doing in 8 or 10 lines it was able to do in 4.

e.g: Get all distribution lists from Exchange Online and then show all the members of each in two columns as "Name" and "Email Address".


Jay

... Winning isn't the end of the world

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Re: Re: Chat Bots (Was: Hub 500)
By: Warpslide to Sean Dennis on Thu Jun 18 2026 04:13:20

I've found Copilot to be good for my needs. It's super helpful when dealing with several things. I use AI as a tool and that's helpful for me. Good for deep Web searches.

I stay away from all LLMs at home, but at work I've used Co-Pilot a couple times. Once to explain vectoring in ML and the other to explain the concept of how everything in Linux is a file. Both results were well done, complete with examples.
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Warpslide wrote to Sean Dennis <=-

I find them especially helpful for the random PowerShell or Bash
commands when you need something in particular.

Gemini helped me with a PowerShell command that took my Multimail taglist
file, converted the line endings to CRLF, sort the file, and eliminate dupes...on its own. I was asking about doing it in cmd but it said, "Here's something that will be more efficient". I normally dislike PS--I think it's overly verbose--but in this case it worked.

I always try and do it myself first just to make sure I can, then I
paste what I've come up with into one of these chat bots and usually
come away amazed at how efficient the code it spits back is. What I
was doing in 8 or 10 lines it was able to do in 4.

e.g: Get all distribution lists from Exchange Online and then show all
the members of each in two columns as "Name" and "Email Address".

Copilot helped me write a MBSE-specific nodelist browser (MBSE uses its own structure for its master nodelist) and wrote it in Free Pascal for me. It
said that since it can see the entire MBSE source code tree, it was trivial
for it to do the heavy lifting. It also wrote a MBSE-specific twit filter also. I need to compile and test those utilities before I release them to
the world.

It also helped me rewrite my BBS doors for Linux in COBOL. LOL

I do have conversations with it but I have no illusions that I am
talking to a human; just "a program that understands what you say well" (quoting Copilot there).

I readily admit to using AI as a tool to help me program some things that
are complicated. Copilot is also good at optimizing code, which it has for
me, an example being my "SeanUnit" (my GP code unit I use in a lot of my non-door programs). If you look at it, you'll see where it tightened things up.

-- digi <8D~

... Is a computer language with GOTOs totally Wirth-less?

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Re: Re: Chat Bots (Was: Hub 500)
By: digimaus to Warpslide on Thu Jun 18 2026 11:16:36

I readily admit to using AI as a tool to help me program some things that are complicated. Copilot is also good at optimizing code...

What would be more beneficial to thee user is instead of an LLM /doing/ the work, it shows you how /you/ could do it. The "teach a man to fish" approach.
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Mortar M. wrote to digimaus <=-

What would be more beneficial to thee user is instead of an LLM /doing/ the work, it shows you how /you/ could do it. The "teach a man to
fish" approach.

Copilot does just that, every time. It shows its logic used to arrive at the conclusion, including pseudo-code to explain the flow of the code. It also will present several possible ways of accomplishing what you want to do and it will explain which option it thinks is best in your particular use case, but
it will do what you ask it to.

I readily admit to using Copilot for some things that are above my skill
level, however, I do learn from there and move on. It really saves time rom hunting down answers on my own on the Web, especially when it comes to things BBS programming.

Does it replace skill? No. The AI makes mistakes but generally
figure out how to fix them to I tell the AI it needs to correct a mistake (usually by telling it that its code will not compile and giving it the compiler error code).

-- Sean


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On 24 Jun 26 17:50:07, Digimaus said the following to Mortar M.:

I readily admit to using Copilot for some things that are above my skill level, however, I do learn from there and move on. It really saves time rom hunting down answers on my own on the Web, especially when it comes to thing BBS programming.

I'll admit it has its purpose and a good effort was put into it, but in my experience it hasn't really helped here. I've seen AI results for tech things which I know to be factually incorrect or misleading... now... "consider
the source", well if its reading from techno-morons on Reddit thats not a
good start, haha.

A good example of having to reallllllly dig deep into the Internets was with Microsoft's own CRM product... Dynamics... and even Sharepoint. This would've been before AI where there were at least a few misleading or wrong
instructions for administering both of them (including from M$'s own site) and only the right answer was found on some obscure tech's personal blog.

I can't imagine what it must be like for a young guy starting off in tech and either fall into a lazy trap of depending on AI for all the answers... or actually working with others in a shop and getting real bench-experience.

Nick

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