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For the last few weeks I have been plunking away on a Discord Bot. The plan was for this to be a simple little thing. A sort of management agent for a group game critique. It keeps track of games that people want to suggest for critique, creates polls to gage interest, schedules critique events, and, with any luck, does all of this with very little effort. Of course, all of that might sound simple, but this involves python coding; something I’m familiar with but not to any sort of proficiency. It also involves hosting the thing and administrating a Linux server; something that I have a little more experience with. I did what anyone trying to set up something like this would do. I went out and found examples on GitHub and stole that code. If you have never written any code, I can’t begin to tell you how far you can get just by stealing some code. First, you see how someone else did the thing you are trying to do. Or a similar sort of thing at the very least. Second, you can break it without worrying too much that you won’t be able to fix it. You already have a working copy to refer back to. So I took my stolen code, mashed that more into the shape I was looking for, and then I set the AI on it. I have said before about using ML agents to work on code. I think it works really well if you already have a working thing that you want to clean up, optimize, or add features to. In this particular case, it worked extremely well. Since Discord bots are a pretty well understood topic, and I wasn’t attempting to do anything really wild, I was usually able to tell Copilot to look at a feature I already had working and extend it or create a new feature based on it. I went from having a little poll creating bot that read out of a database I hosted, to having a fairly full featured, not terribly ugly, critique management system, while only really working on it a few hours over a handful of weekends. Now I have to let some actual people mess with it and break it.