So after a lot of testing, the shopping cart has gone live.
Thanks again to Grok for the help, but more details below
Here is a real world example of using AI and software coding.
- At the start I did not know how to add a shopping cart to the website
- So I asked Grok to do it and with the free 20 questions, it actually got something part way there
- I sprung for the $20/month and actually got a clunky version of it working with a number of trial and errors
- I came back a few days later and asked Grok to turn it into a Grav Plugin -- another thing I did not know how to do.
- Grok started on that, but ran into a number of errors, that were in part due to the original clunky version
- Here is where I had to do some digging, between me looking at logs in Stripe, and having Grok write a couple small test programs to narrow down where it was going wrong
- Grok was also lost on why the Plugin did not show up, and I ended up comparing to other plugins and reading some Grav documentation
- Eventually it did work and was visible to the Grav admin page
- But there were a few things Grok kept dropping out of the code (the simple add_to_cart_button)
- And I asked why there was duplication of some functions in 2 different php files. Turns out one was not needed and was causing confusion
- Grok had never mentioned removing it, until I asked about it
So all in all I was pretty impressed with the Grok in that it did work, however it did need debug help and some help on proper direction (like using plugins vs inline code)
So as I expected software engineers won't totally go away, but some of the grunt programming tasks can be done by AI, and the engineer will be the system designer and maybe debugger even in the long run
The test mode version will stay up as a demo for a while