The client wants to drag and drop their own personalized excel file with no guaranteed formatting or column order or data contract in order to import their data into our system <3
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Needs more AI to randomly guess what the columns might be
I love how this is a universal experience.
Jesus, this gave me war flashbacks.
Strangely enough we actually solved this problem with AI a few months back. We upload the excel file to Gemini and have a prompt to extract the data we need in a specific json format. And it works surprisingly well.
How well? Bet your life on it well, or "fewer hallucinations than we would have guessed" well? I've considered and toyed around with openAI models for logging supply room check offs in a JSON format and it went better than I hoped but worse than I needed.
Really well. Temp turned down all the way, and Gemini has this new feature to run and execute code.... Not function calling... It can write a small python script, run it and return the output.
So our prompt explains the excel spreadsheet, then tell it exactly the format we need it in, and then tell it to use python and pandas to read in the CSV, clean it up and reshape it the way we need it to match what we expect and voila.
So hallucinations are not really and issue with the data as it's simply writing code which then deterministically processes and returns the data.
Edit to add more info: basically Gemini can create and run a lambda function on the fly. And if you're a coder you can really guide the prompt. Eg "load this into pandas. Then remove all the empty columns. Also remove the total rows. Now unpivot the data so the months are not columns but in separate rows with a column called month.
You get the idea.
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I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.
My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.
When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.
Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.
Heh, that won't stop a C-level from thinking that you just write code.
Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.
Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers.
Maybe this is North American thing because in Europe they never really got rid of human cashiers, they just had the automated systems alongside the human cashiers.
I don't know of any store that went over to 100% self-checkout
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That's why the best places to work tend to be the places where your CEO has had your job before.
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That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.
That's a good analogy, I will use that.
Full self driving.... NOW.
See. It can turn the steering wheel on is own. Feature complete!!
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It could also be possible that AI doesn't write code but becomes the new software. Hook it up to libraries, contractions, databases and pump it full of the verbatim ramblings from the client, sales guy and manager. Sure, it costs a magnitude more power to run but it's up in no time.
Then hire a few consultants that used to be senior engineers for an outrageous amount to trace the weird hallucinations and replace the mission critical part with real code.
The future is going to be wacko.
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No, the customer wants a button that does a very specific thing.
He can't tell you what that is, though. You're the expert!
Also, can you put in more ads? And make it so the users can't close the tab until they bought something.
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This is when the AI, in a microsecond, decided to destroy the human race.
Not gonna lie, I don't really blame the AI.
This is why we definitely shouldn’t rewrite the nuclear launch software. A project manager could unintentionally push a programmer into justifiably ending the fucking planet.
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Another crap meme made with AI, yay, I love AI slop
I had a client once explain to me that his request for the 75% redesign of his mobile app would be simple because "it's just 3 pages"
That was the exact quote
I know that was hardly related to the post, but it reminded me of that and I needed to vent to my therapist (aka strangers on Lemmy)
I feel you. Just ended coding "a little special case" that resulted in dozens of files changed, all because I refused to make it with dirty hidden hack, and that was a clear-cut technical if-branching even, no vague ideas
Talking to a client is times that amount of hurdle
Button that does something? That’s too advanced for me, I’ll use a library
Help, Debian has libbutton only in 1.4.3 and libdosomething is not in my repo. I compiled libdosomething from source, but now it needs libbutton >= 2.4.1 and compiling that version of libbutton fails, as my GCC and make are too old and incompatible!
I already tried it on my other PC, but that isn't based on glibc, which makes all these dependencies even worse...
Have you tried unplugging your computer, going out into the woods, and returning to monke?
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cries in left_pad
It's kind of astonishing how many people leaned on that library just to add fucking spaces to strings
It should be in the standard library anyway. Why the hell is it not?!
I mean yeah, I can write my own function to do the same thing and probably I've done it at some point in some coding exercise as a beginner, but this seems like such a common thing to use, it should be in the standard library of any sane language.
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Surprised there's no one in the comments going bat shit crazy that this was made by AI. Are we not doing that anymore?
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You know what we, in the industry, call a detailed specification fo requirements detailed enough to produce software? Code.
Managers about to find out the hard way that all the requirements are in the brains of those they laid off.
I’m sure coding bootcamp and AI will turn them into leet hax0rs.
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presses button; nothing happens
"Well see here! I wanted that button to do something!"
"Oh but it did! It wasted your time as well as mine!"
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Whoa whoa, hold on there! You can't expect a product manager to come up with such detailed specs!
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Customer requirements are basically always “I want what my Excel sheet used to do”.
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"Y'know, I've been thinking... The app is missing a couple of things, like This, and That, and it should also do This after That, but not That after This, and maybe even navigate to The Other Thing after 3 Launch events, while also not doing that if the user is under a Pisces moon in the 4th Year of Wilting..."
"So... you want a Rate the App pop-up with specific trigger conditions?"
"What?! No! I want one of those prompts with the stars and the redirect to the Store which lets people post reviews of the app, what are you even talking about?!"
AI Junior Dev: short-circuits
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AI Project Manager: Create a button on a webpage that, when clicked, displays an alert saying "Hello World!"
AI Programmer: "What a sensible requirement! Here you go."
AI Billing Department: "Project completed, that'll be 10 million dollars."
Client AI Payments Department: "Sounds right, paid!"
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My wife had her first meeting with Chat Gpt today.
She went from a random question about her job to the AI offering to taking care of her LinkedIn page, and promoting alternative positions for her.
It feels to me the product manager is in trouble too.
"Can we jazz it up a bit?"
This is a real request from a real manager. They have played us for absolute fools.
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Me: I need spec -- not just trust code Manager: You always make unnecessary demands, I'm replacing you AI: I would be happy to help you, if you could provide spec? Manager: god fuckin dammit
I honestly sometimes think to go into business myself just so I can write contracts that say "you will give us a fucking spec" and just keep billing while they fuck around not providing a spec
Current LLMs would end that sketch soon, agreeing with everything the client wants. Granted, they wouldn't be able to produce, but as far as the expert narrowing down the issues of the request, ChatGPT would be all excited about making it happen.
The hardest thing to do with an LLM is to get it to disagree with you. Even with a system prompt. The training deep down to make the user happy with the results is too embedded to undo.
The hardest thing to do with an LLM is to get it to disagree with you.
Yeah, I occasionally use conversational AI and its really hard to let the AI have any agency in the story because they usually just go ahead with whatever you write
A trick I've employed is to pretend to believe in something completely different. If it says "no, you're wrong" and goes on to tell me what I actually believe, then it's a good indicator that I might be on the right path.
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