Scratching your own itch with AI

Many have written about this already, but regardless of how you feel about AI (in engineering or otherwise), it’s hard to overstate how wonderful it is to be able to scratch your own itch.

I’ve always loved IntelliJ’s ‘history for line selection feature’, it’s great: select a line range and easily navigate through the history:

GitLens and similar VSCode extensions don’t really come close to this. You can say ‘show me the history for this line’, but it doesn’t let you easily navigate through just that specific range.

In just minutes I had exactly what I wanted in VSCode, thanks to Codex. Here it is (unpublished/not in the store):

Then, just the other week, while I was mucking around with Lua, I realized that the Busted VSCode test runner plugin wasn’t great and didn’t support debugging. So I vibe’d one. It works great, at least for my limited use case.

Maintaining this stuff and all the gnarly edge cases I’m sure remain unsolved is a different story, but how awesome is it to just be able to do this kind of stuff, off the cuff, in minutes?