Thinking about what a modern AppleScript would look like powered by LLMs. The human language-like syntax of AppleScript was the right idea, but there were syntax quirks that made it frustrating. LLMs could fix that. Free idea! I’m tempted but it’s too far outside the scope of Micro.blog’s mission.

@manton I've had similar thoughts about an AI front-end to Shortcuts.

@manton yeah forget about syntax, just write what you want. haven't you been doing that? when i need an SQL query i just explain what i want and it writes it for me. there doesn't need to be a specific syntax if it understands what you say when you talk.

@manton "I need a query that can delete a set of blogposts based on conditions as i will now explain. we're concerned with all the posts on the most recent day of posts in the database. i will provide a list of datetime values of whenCreated values for posts on that day that should not be deleted. all posts on that day who are not on the list should be deleted."

that's a prompt i wrote yesterday. it understood and the code it wrote didn't run because it used an SQL feature that wasn't in MySQL. i pointed that out and it wrote a more complex query using joins that did work. i never would have been able to write that code, not even come close to it.

@dave I'm imagining something that collapses the workflow even more. You don't even see the intermediary code. Just write a "script" in natural language and it executes it.

@manton Same with CSS, which is a voodoo language. Now I have it under control. And get this -- I can even paste in a screen shot to explain what's going wrong. The only complain I have is that it absolutely loves flex types and they are also voodoo, a new kind of voodoo, and not very flexible when in the hands of a novice at flex such as myself.

@7robots Exactly. As nice as Shortcuts is, sometimes you want to type a script, not click and drag widgets.

@manton Apple Script and Regular Expressions are by far my most common use of ChatGPT. These are two things I can never remember the syntax for.

@manton Wow. I couldn't disagree more. As far as I'm aware, there is nothing forgiving about AppleScript: it's every bit as picky as most programming languages. I don't think it even has many synonyms. It just tricks you into thinking you can type any old English, when you can't.

@manton I guess I can buy that maybe its easier for non-programmers to read, but I think AppleScript is way harder for most people to write than ordinary scripting languages. I've actually never met anyone who likes it, neither programmers nor civilians. I think it was one of Apple's biggest misses.

@njr That’s what I mean about using AI to actually make it like real language. The tech now allows what wasn’t possible a couple decades ago.

@manton Yes, I get that bit.