Sorry to hear about your (presumably) STEM work being impacted. A close friend of mine is a director for a national STEM education thing and her org has been similarly impacted in deep ways. Your Python bootcamp work is awesome. I have no idea how to get into that sort of work, but it sounds extremely rewarding and fun. My lack of a 4 year degree can hold me back into those careers typically held by academics. My learning has been non-traditional/teaching myself while being tossed in the deep end at various jobs over the last 2 decades. Iāve been looking for a change to something more āmeaningfulā like that, just very slowly since Iām relatively happy with my current role and have plenty to do.
Given you sound good on the Python front, I assume the only thing you might run into friction would be the Poetry stuff, because Python packaging remains a nightmare, as Iām sure it was when you last interacted with it. Or some of the abstract AppDaemon shenanigans, I found confusing while learning. If you run into any annoying blockers there, please donāt hesitate to ping me.
The AI stuff, I donāt use it heavily here but it can be useful. I use it as a productivity enhancer and to teach myself new topics faster than I could in the days without good LLMs. I tend to feed way more context in my prompts than I see others do, which might be how I get more effective results. I hate not being able to articulate better how I get results, as it makes it feel magical when Iām sure itās not. But I can share some actual prompts Iāve used before on things Iām working on as an example, via email or something.
most of my work I was forbidden to use AI tools, so those are mostly new to me
I did hear that Anthropic released a Claude model that has been approved for work in US classified environments on national security workloads. It sounds like times may be slowly changing there.
In the case of this project, I feed a lot of context to ChatGPTās Codex tool using the AGENTS.md. Itās the first thing Codex will look to for initial context and instructions for this. And behind the scenes in OpenAIās configuration for Codex, I configure secrets and other stuff in its runtime environment variables. That way, it can do things for me like I asked you for earlier. I can say, āIāve armed you with the needed info to connect to the Pulse API, now connect to these endpoints Iām going to paste, using my device info, and make a PR with the captured JSON output from each, in a way that is consistent with the existing mock JSON files.ā And it was able to do that without any further exposition from me.
Now that I have a decent, working base on this project, Codex can be really helpful doing major refactoring without breaking the program. Iāve found more abstract or cute ways of doing things as I reach the edges of this or that engineering approach in AppDaemonās framework, and explaining to Codex this is how I do things now and hereās a quick sketch out of how I want things to be refactored, it does a pretty good job filling in the blanks close to how I wouldāve. Then I can just pull its branch, do some fixups, squash some commits, and I have a solid refactor.
Hopefully that gives some helpful perspective. Feel free to follow up with any questions, of course.
