Spot on. I'm not A Programmer(TM), but I have dabbled in a lot of languages doing a lot of random things.
Sometimes I have qwen2.5-coder:14b whip up a script to do some little thing where I don't want to spend a week doing remedial go/python just to get back to learning how to write boilerplate. All that experience means I can edit it easily enough because recognition kicks in and drags the memory kicking and screaming back into the front.
I quickly discovered it was essentially defaulting to "absolute novice." No error handlers, no file/folder existence checking, etc. I had to learn to put all that into the prompt.
>> "Write a python script to scrape all linked files of a certain file extension on a web page under the same domain as the page. Follow best practices. Handle errors, make strings OS-independent, etc. Be persnickety. Be pythonic."
I'm far from an expert and my memory might be foggy, but that looks like a solid script. I can see someone with less practice doing battle with debuggers trying the first thing that comes out without all the extra prompting hitting errors and not having any clue.
For example: I wrote a thing that pulled a bunch of JSON blobs from an API. Fixing the "out of handles" error is how I learned about file system and network default limits on open files and connections, and buffering. Hitting stuff like that over and over was educational and instilled good habits.
Sometimes I have qwen2.5-coder:14b whip up a script to do some little thing where I don't want to spend a week doing remedial go/python just to get back to learning how to write boilerplate. All that experience means I can edit it easily enough because recognition kicks in and drags the memory kicking and screaming back into the front.
I quickly discovered it was essentially defaulting to "absolute novice." No error handlers, no file/folder existence checking, etc. I had to learn to put all that into the prompt.
>> "Write a python script to scrape all linked files of a certain file extension on a web page under the same domain as the page. Follow best practices. Handle errors, make strings OS-independent, etc. Be persnickety. Be pythonic."
Here's the output: https://gist.github.com/kyefox/d42471893de670a2a4179482d3c8b...
I'm far from an expert and my memory might be foggy, but that looks like a solid script. I can see someone with less practice doing battle with debuggers trying the first thing that comes out without all the extra prompting hitting errors and not having any clue.
For example: I wrote a thing that pulled a bunch of JSON blobs from an API. Fixing the "out of handles" error is how I learned about file system and network default limits on open files and connections, and buffering. Hitting stuff like that over and over was educational and instilled good habits.