AI Comfort Levels
For quite a while I have been reluctant to invest much time into using AI for more than setting alarms, timers, and adding things to my reminders. But, I've been playing around with some of the free tools lately and I'm pretty impressed with whats possible now.
Siri AI
With the beta versions of iOS 27 and MacOS 27 I have been able to ask Siri to find info buried in my personal data. The assistant has been much more useful than in the past. It can perform more complex tasks with multiple steps.
One thing Siri AI doesn't seem to be very good at is programming. They seem to have limited it for these initial releases. You can use the other popular models with X-Code now, but I haven't given that a try yet.
Codex
I have also been playing with ChatGPT and Codex. I'm only using the free version for now. It looks like it can get expensive quick. That's one of the reasons I hope Apples new OS's will be able to get close to whats possible with Codex.
Using Codex to fix filename issues
One thing I used Codex for recently was fixing the names of music video mp4s I have in my collection. There are around 4500 files in this folder. Some files are named poorly and there are even a few duplicates.
I started by asking Codex to look at the folder and verify how many files there were. Then I told it what the file name pattern should be and asked it to compile a list of files that did not meet this pattern. There were about 250 files it found that were not named correctly. I was going to turn this into a renaming script, but I asked Codex to do this for me.
Not only did Codex create the script, but it also properly renamed the files based on the pattern I previously described. It was able to smartly determine which parts were the artist name, which parts were the song name, and when there was extranous data that was ok to remove. I verified that the file was correct and ran the script in the terminal.
The next task was to identify duplicate files. It was able to find 12 or so files that might have duplicates. Some of these were live versions that I did not change. But, again it did find a few files that were duplicates, even though the file names were different.
This all saved me several hours.
Using Codex to create an application
I use Jellyfin to serve up video files, movies, tv shows, and Music Videos on our local network. I'm not really happy with most of the clients on the Apple TV. They work, but never in the way I want.
I spent a few hours over the last couple weeks creating a proof of concept client in Javascript and HTML to login to our server and play content. I was able to get shuffle play working properly for our music video library.
What I want to do is the same thing in an Apple TV App that works the way I want it to. I decided to use Codex to create the first version of this App. I described what I wanted to Codex. It created a new project for me, that almost worked. I had to tell it to fix a few things to make it work correctly in X-Code. A few minutes later I had a basic App that will let me login to our Jellyfin server, navigate through the Libraries, view items in the libraries, and play MP4s.
There were a few issues with images that I was able to get it to fix with another prompt. It was also loading all the items in the music video library at once. So I asked it to add pagination to that view. Again, in just a few minutes it made the change and had most of the functionality my prototype had.
Unfortunately that was when I received a warning that I was about to run our of usage for the month. So, in a 10-15 minutes I was able to duplicate most of what I had done by hand in 4-5 hours. Kind of amazing really.
All of this is easier to manage when you know what to ask for and how to describe what you want.
I'm constantly amazed by what these tools can and can't do. Some things that seem incredible are easy for them, while other things that we take for granted are very hard for these tools to get right. Hmm, so I wonder how much it would be to run my own models for development locally?