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i had an interesting experience with cursor. i use it everyday btw i had two csvs. one had an ISBN column, the other had isbn10, isbn13, and isbn. i tried to t
by greenie_beans 2y ago
i had an interesting experience with cursor. i use it everyday btw
i had two csvs. one had an ISBN column, the other had isbn10, isbn13, and isbn. i tried to tell it to write python code that would merge these two sheets by finding the matching isbns. didn't work very well. it was trying to do pandas then i tried to get it to use pure python. it took what felt like an hour of back and forth with terrible results.
in a new chat, i told it that i wanted to know different algorithms for solving the problem. once we weighed all of the options, it wrote perfect python code. took like 5 minutes. like duh use a hashmap, why was that so hard?
- __mharrison__ 2y agoChat knows how to merge CSVs with pandas. You just need to know how to prompt it correctly. (Or at least it did at the start of this year when I gave a keynote at PyCon Philippines with that exact use case.)
- greenie_beans 2y agoseems simple and obvious but not when the columns have different keys, and there could be one or more keys to match upon. i would be curious to see how you can prompt that? and you are correct, you just need to know how to prompt it correctly by going back to first principles, just like what i did.
- __mharrison__ 2y agoTossing in the first few rows of the CSV in the prompt helps.
- greenie_beans 2y agono kidding? this industry should stop telling people: "you are just prompting wrong" when they've never seen the prompting session.