Re: RPG and AI -- RPG400-L

For anyone interested.

I am working ( in my spare time) on a project to extract the
knowledge out from "old" RPG code into a CST - concrete syntax tree.

With the CST I can use a pre-trained model and ask it to produce similar
code in any other language - also FREE RPG.

The tooling I am using is Ollama, and a VSCode plugin called continue ..
this is extremely impressive and can already document ( on a high level)
what a git repo containing a mix of SQL and RPG is actually doing.

The cool thing about Ollama is that you download that LLM on your PC so you
don't expose your code to the internet - it takes up 3GB of disk.

My CST project can be found here.

https://github.com/NielsLiisberg/ILEcst

.. it is premature so everybody is invited to collaborate on this to create
a brighter future for RPG.

Ollama the LLM can be found and downloaded here

https://ollama.com

On Wed, Oct 16, 2024 at 8:54 AM Daniel Gross <daniel@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Dave,

Am 16.10.2024 um 06:38 schrieb Dave <dfx1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Chat GPT, I don't know anything else.
I'm completely new to AI, I haven't been following what's going on at

all.

I don't know what an LLM even is.

Well - you should read about it a bit. AI is a trend now, and because the
software companies and consultants see an opportunity to make serious money
out of it, it won't go away soon.

The trend will end like the "everything mobile" or "everything cloud"
trends - with harsh realities and the insight, that an awful lot of money
was burned without a real business value.

I was looking for a way to convert a JSON schema to tables and fell upon

a

JSON converter for ChatGPT.
Anyway, I copied and pasted a complex schema in the chat and after a

while

it confirmed it was complicated and asked if I would like to see
information about specific objects.

Here I have some questions. Did Chat-GPT give you back some sort of
analysis of the JSON schema? In form of objects and relationships?

I was able to give it the objects I was
interested in, and copy the result directly into a spreadsheet.

OK sounds interesting.

After
analysis, I gave it back the spreadsheet data and asked it to create
physical files (using the json names as aliases while generating its own
field names from these) and a basic program that read from the file.

Did it create DDS or SQL/DDL specifications?
What do you mean with a "basic program" - simply trivial code with READ
loop?

I needed fixed form code so I specified RPG400. Came back with a lot of
Z-ADD and MOVE operations. I said go and do it again with EVAL and it

did.

This might be a time saver. But did you verify that the program indeed
works as intended?

I experimented only a bit with AI - after being presented some
definitively wrong program code for somehow trivial problems, I lost
interest some weeks ago. It's simply easier and faster to write that code
myself, that to let an artificial "junior developer" write it, and then
trying to understand, verify and correct it.

Don't get me wrong - if I have a real junior developer with me, this is
something that needs to be done - that junior needs feedback and training -
fine.

But an AI? I train it, so the company can sell me back my own knowledge?
No thanks.

Just my 2ct.
Daniel

On Tue, 15 Oct 2024 at 19:03, Dave <dfx1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I've only just discovered it and it makes me wish I could have my career
all over again.

I've been copying and pasting spreadsheet tables and telling it to
generate the DDS and write an RPG program with the cycle that reads one
file and populates another all from the spreadsheet.
For procedure logic, I've been copying and pasting pseudocode, I don't
even have to tell it that it's in French.

Once it generated program code before I gave it my table. I told it I
hadn't yet done so, it replied OK send me the table and I'll do it

again.

Astonishing

On Mon, 14 Oct 2024 at 12:15, Dave <dfx1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello,

Has there been any discussion on using AI to code RPG applications?
Would be grateful if anyone could point me to the thread as I didn't

find

anything.
Thanks

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