Modernizing a 40-Year-Old Scientific Plotting Library Using AI

George Kelley and I bought Corona PCs at the time the first IBM PC was released. We got Coronas because they had high-resolution screens (640 x 480 at the time!) so that we could make the kind of scientific plots we were used to making using DISSPLA on mainframe computers.  But there was no suitable software. . .

For Mac power users managing multi-terabyte digital archives—such as lossless classical music collections, video production masters, and high-resolution photo libraries—file management is not merely about dragging an icon from Point A to Point B. These workflows demand two non-negotiable capabilities:

I have just spent two days trying to get a file manager that works for me on my Mac Studio, now running Golden Gate. Golden Gate broke drag and drop in ForkLift 3. I had used ForkLift 4, but it kept crashing, and also never fixed the file path breadcrumbs for a year.

So, I was stuck, and tried every solution (I think). I manage multiple Web sites and it is essential to me to get sftp connections to these ISP hosts. If you do not require remote mounts, use Finder.

I wanted to track downloads of my applications, and no existing Drupal modules seemed to do exactly what I want to do, so I asked Antigravity to create one. I called it Download Tracker.

It has fine grained directory access, and can track public and private files served by Drupal.

I had been a T-Mobile customer for many years and was generally pleased with my service until I got an e-mail stating that they were changing my plan and adding $6 a month to my bill. This led me to consider alternatives.

Consumer Reports reviewed cell carriers and ranked US Mobile as best, because you could get a SIM for each of the three major carriers (T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon), and switch between as reception varied for about 1/3 of the cost. Sounded like a good deal. What could go wrong since I could still use T-Mobile?

I praised Antigravity to a friend, and he asked Grok about it:

I have been using Google's Antigravity to write desktop (windows and MacOS) applications that are much better and more polished than I could have created myself. But I did have to do lots of testing and refinement interactively. Please checkout my store at

https://jamesrome.com

Antigravity (AG) is Google's developer workspace that lets AI create programs on various platforms. 

I got an email trying to get me to subscribe to spotfix (https://www.doboard.com/spotfix):

It seemed like an interesting idea, so I asked Gemini (Flash Extended) to create a Drupal 11 module that would do this.

NB: I HAVE RENAMED THIS PROJECT CommentOn

I have been slowly starting to use AI on my Mac Studio. Since I am embedded in the Google ecosystem, my AI of choice is Gemini.

I spent most of last weekend taking a Zoom course called C135 Generative AI Mastermind INTL. It opened my eyes to see what could be done using AI. Their bottom line was that it is vital to create a structured requirements document to get good results. This week I decided to try and do something difficult. I tried this using Bolt (recommended in the course, but ran out of tokens, so I tried it using Gemini (I had a Pro subscription).