I want to tell you about a neat experience I had with AI-assisted programming this week. What’s unusual here is: the AI didn’t write a sin

AI-generated tools can make programming more fun

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2024-12-25 03:30:03

I want to tell you about a neat experience I had with AI-assisted programming this week. What’s unusual here is: the AI didn’t write a single line of my code. Instead, I used AI to build a custom debugger UI… which made it more fun for me to do the coding myself.

I was hacking on a Prolog interpreter as a learning project. Prolog is a logic language where the user defines facts and rules, and then the system helps answer queries. A basic interpreter for this language turns out to be an elegant little program with surprising power—a perfect project for a fun learning experience.

The trouble is: it’s also a bit finicky to get the details right. I encountered some bugs in my implementation of a key step called unification—solving symbolic equations—which was leading to weird behavior downstream. I tried logging some information at each step of execution, but I was still parsing through screens of text output looking for patterns.

I needed better visibility. So, I asked Claude Artifacts to whip up a custom UI for viewing one of my execution traces. After a few iterations, here’s where it ended up:

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