So, earlier this week I got a request to produce a report(or more specifically an Excel file) - for someone here at work to review a whole bunch of Work Orders/Jobs - based upon the criteria of parts being manufactured had a particular process completed and the processing occurred on or after a day in August of last year.

Suffice it to say - the database systems are VERY Complicated here - and there are actually 2 huge systems - that also have a lot of interactions between them. And, all the data relations are ALSO Very complicated.

The deal is, each part being manufactured has a Routing process, where the part is routed to different areas in the manufacturing facility here, to have different processes completed to create the final part. And, there is a Routing report that is printed. So, I was pointed to a VFP program that was used to print the Routing report, a program that was updated to allow the program code to run independently, outside of the whole system/project.

So, the idea was to review the program - and create a new program to gather up the data being requested. But, again - even that program is a bit rough to go thru, and may not have all the pieces. I was struggling a bit to try and get this done, and yet I knew it had to be done quickly.

Well, yesterday morning on the way to work I came up with the game plan. The obvious answer was to have Claude create the program. So, I gave it the reporting program, as well as the criteria - and after resolving some of the hallucinations - I WAS Able to get a viable program running and produce the needed Excel files!!! Which I was really thrilled about.

Now, just to give folks an idea of some of the hallucinations from Claude, I will include some of them here.

My Fav one is that Claude created a Cursor, then later in the code it did a Seek on the Cursor - but, the cursor had NO Index! Then, another one was in the Summary message it was printing to the screen. At one point it had this: ? "="*60

Which is simply not valid. And, yet, a couple lines down it did it correctly with this line: ? REPLICATE("-", 80)

I find it Ironic that it would do an incorrect AND a correct version of similar code in the same program. Just kind of weird. Also, there was code involved in regards to building this kind of Job#. In the reporting program there were actually TWO Chunks of code related to building the Job# - but, in the program produced by Claude - he failed to implement the one chunk. I told Claude about this, and said it was related to a specific variable being used - then he correctly rectified the problem.

So, all in all - it was a Fantastic Success. And, the idea of giving a Difficult problem to Claude and let him take a Whack at it - turned out to be a good decision.

Anyway...

For those that are interested, and have not tried Claude AI yet - you can use this link: https://claude.ai/referral/_eI4SiLd2A

Have a GREAT Holiday Weekend folks (at least those of you in the ol' US of A!) -Kurt