I continue to be impressed with how quickly AI tools can help develop useful systems. Today I had several documents in Markdown format to read which were made challenging because they featured tables with significant amounts of information. I’ve often been using a command line program called glow but that was truncating the information. Since I’m going through a phase where I’m having to interact a lot with AI I asked it to suggest some options. I knew some of the results it came up with (which included glow) but I didn’t really want to install another program, so I asked a further question, about whether there was a website I could load a Markdown file into and have it render in a flexible table. The answer was yes but not all were entirely clear about my requirement for local processing. Some of the data I’m working with is potentially sensitive so I don’t want it being hoovered up elsewhere.

That led me to asking if it could build me such a web page to run locally and, about three minutes later, I had just such a solution. As a sanity check, I asked a different AI tool to assess the page for security and it came up with a number of small refinements, such as verifying the content delivery networks that provide some of the JavaScript tools involved. All told though, it was about 15-20 minutes and I had a web page that not only does an excellent job of rendering Markdown in the browser (including large tables) but bonus features I didn’t ask for. I can drop a file onto the page and, if I drop a second one, it creates a new tab within the page allowing a batch of files to be assessed.

Back in the old days (in other words just a few months ago), that kind of task would have been a non-starter. I’d have needed hours to research, code, test and develop. The security audit wouldn’t even have been covered as I’d have put far too much time in just to get to the starting line. As it is, I’ve got a tool that has already saved time from what it would have cost to try and browse the files with glow and I’m sure is going to be used again and again. AI coding support hasn’t reached the point where I can just put my feet up and let it do all the work but it is often able to speed things up in a way that, not too long ago, would have seemed entirely like science fiction!