Tools, not chats
Why it matters If you paste the same kind of thing into a chat every week (a log, a diff, a bug report) and ask the same kind of question, you are paying for the same thinking again and again, and getting a slightly different answer each time.
A small tool, written once, answers that question the same way every time, in milliseconds, on data you cannot or should not paste anywhere. AI is very good at helping you write such tools. It is often a poor replacement for them.
Three ingredients
Plain code: parsing, counting, grouping. A unified diff has a format; parse it properly once and you never have to explain it again.
Similarity: a number for "how alike are these two things". It can be as simple as the share of words two texts have in common. Embeddings are a richer version of the same idea; word overlap is often enough, and you can see exactly why it matched.
Rules: the team's knowledge written down. "A change under migrations/ needs a second reviewer." Rules are boring, explicit and easy to argue about, which is what you want from a check.
When to build instead of ask
- You will ask the same kind of question more than a few times.
- The answer should be the same each time (a check, a grouping, a ranking).
- The input is large, private or arrives continuously.
- You can state what "right" means well enough to write a test.
The four problems in this module are tools of exactly this kind. Each has a hidden input or a budget that the quick version fails, because real data is messier than the example you have in your head.
Recap Build a tool when the question repeats, the answer should be stable and you can say what right means. Code, simple similarity and explicit rules go a long way.
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