Automation wins

This morning, indieblog.page on Mastodon pointed me to You should write deliberately bad tools from Qword and I had to chuckle, as it exactly describes why I treated myself to about 50 minutes of tomfoolery yesterday, though at a considerably lower level than Qword’s.

A lot of people are down on tools like ChatGPT for reasons I fully understand. Heck, I’m down on it myself as a substitute for a human writer. But to help my amateur programming efforts, I find it insanely useful.

Lately, I have been having to comment on a bunch of documents in my second-least-favourite word processor, Pages. Each time I open a file, I have to Hide the Inspector Pane and Show the Comments & Changes Pane. Even once I’d learned the keyboard shortcuts, that was still a pain in the bum. I did a little bit of looking at Keyboard Maestro and at Applescript and then asked ChatGPT to write me a script. We had to go through a few iterations to get it working as expected, but in far less time than it would have taken me on my own, I had a script that would toggle the two panes from their existing state to the other state.

Step two was to attach the script to a KM macro triggered by a hot key. Not at all difficult, with one hitch. It worked perfectly well from within KM, but not from the hot key. Again, I turned to ChatGPT but this time the sheer number of possible explanations seemed like too much work. I asked in the KM forum. Rapid answers from helpful humans and all was good.

I’m shaving at least a second off a task I am doing at least 25 times a day. It took me about an hour to do that. I reckon I’m well in credit as per xkcd.