Is anyone using an AI product for coding with any success?

I ask this question after two recent incidents:

(1) I was searching google for answers to an issue compiling an older, abandoned FOSS C project... I am not fluent in C... and wound up
interacting with Gemini. It got me on the right track in the sense that we fixed the compile error (caused by compiler and library updates) and got it running.
(2) reading about and using Claude's BBS, which was apparently written with
the assistance of AI.

In my personal case, I found that Gemini was good up to a point, but had trouble remembering what we were working on after a while -- after we got
into the weeds about squashing some memory leaks. We got sidetracked a little and then it completely forgot what we were doing. It also hallucinated
some.

However, after interacting with Claude's BBS and seeing what it looks like,
I have a very old C project (DOS!) that I wouldn't mind running by some
other AI product to see if it could help me fix a nagging bug. I also have a few other ideas I wouldn't mind trying out.

So I am wondering if anyone has had success with AI, which AI, free or
paid, and maybe if it is some AI that you are hosting yourself (and, if so,
is it linux based?)?

Thanks!


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On 2026-02-20 10:17:58, Mike Powell (1:2320/105) wrote to ALL:

So I am wondering if anyone has had success with AI, which AI, free or paid, and maybe if it is some AI that you are hosting yourself (and, if so, is it linux based?)?

I've had some success tinkering with some Nim code in Google Antigravity. I was surprised Nim worked at all given it's a fairly niche language. C/C++ will obviously be better supported since it's trained on a larger sample of code.

My tinkering was all just out of curiosity since I have no real use for AI stuff. If I ever use it in future in production I'd sandbox it on its own PC, and restrict it to just creating code snippets to solve problems or write quick template code. My instinct is to never trust it to work with a whole project.

Also among other things I don't trust AI-enabled IDEs enough to give them full access to all the files in my home directory.

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