I’ve written about CoPilots before, and here’s an example of one I built some time ago and found quite helpful.
What if you could highlight a block of code in the Airtable editor, and with a single keyboard shortcut, it could instantly examine the code to reveal:
- What its purpose is, and how it works.
- The most likely ways it might fail.
- The technical debt that it carries and the estimated cost of that debt.
The [Paste] button inserts this content as a comment above the examined code.
This is pretty cool, and I use it a lot, partly because I’m lazy; I don’t want to examine my own code, let alone code written by others.
I have used this when reading code examples in various communities; it is designed to work everywhere you are looking at code and includes ignoring statements like output.Markdown().
I used a script from @Oglesbeard above as an example to see how well it would compare with his excellent documentation of the function. Snipity-Do did alright.
In my practice, this utility also posts analytics into a Coda document, such as who wrote the code, the date/time it was assessed, what additional comments were added by the person assessing the code, etc. I use it to track progress and change as much as it is used to inform a developer of some things to look out for.
I can use this tool across Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It can be used inside any editor, app, or desktop app and Slack.
I’ll be happy to field questions about the approach I used to create this utility, but not in this thread. Contact me direct (bill.french@gmail.com) or do it here. But first, I'd love some feedback …
- Is this something that fills a gap?
- Does it have value?
- Who amongst you would love to take this basic functionality and go nuts with it in a commercial way?