I’m not a developer. I just got basic coding knowledge. I can read simple code.
I recently created a plugin, relying mostly on Gemini free. 95% of the code was AI-generated.
While the plugin definitely works, and the interface and admin experience are quite alright, I have legitimate concerns about the code cleanliness. Despite my prompting efforts[1] (and manually feeding the AI with excerpts of official code), I’m certain the code doesn’t make great use of the Discourse environment. Helpers, components, classes, and so on. Which is why I occasionally fed it with pieces of official code.
I heard that nowadays, many developers use AI in their workflow. I’m curious about how better an AI-generated Discourse plugin code would be if the AI were aware of the Discourse ecosystem.
I was advised to try Claude, and more specifically, the Opus model. I was also told it’s very token-consuming and thus expensive.
I don’t have real ambitions regarding my projects. It’s just a hobby. I’m curious about how a plugin I imagine would look in the real world, and AIs are fairly good for this.
Have you tried using AI when developing plugins or components? Did you try Claude Opus integrated into your IDE? How helpful was it?
Does it make proper use of the codebase to generate new code?
How expensive is it? Which plan did you go for?
writing “prompting efforts” makes me feel awkwardly embarrassed ↩︎
I’ve found that it’s significantly better to work with AI on Discourse if it has examples to work from, and Claude Code is specifically good at this (Google Gemini’s CLI too!).
For a hobbyist, the $20/mo plan could probably take you pretty far… it’s not too hard to run into daily limits, but at that point you can either just wait until the limit resets or buy some credits.
I think I was mistaken about the price. The free/pro/max plans are for using Gemini through their web interface. (https://claude.com/pricing). The API price is token-based (https://claude.com/pricing#api); there are no monthly subscriptions for using their API, right?
If using AI in, let’s say, VSCode, needs to use their API.
edit : well I’ll read some tutorials before writing next time
This past week I spent some time trying to write a Discourse plugin using ask.discourse. I was amazed how I could describe the function of the plugin I wished to create and it spit out lots of tips and code snippets, some of which actually ran.
I’m a hobbyist programmer. Along side my Discourse instance I run another server with a MySQL database, a PHP backend and a Jquery/Javascript frontend but I am not a proffesional programer. Most the time when developing that site, I just feed plan old google what I want and it (Gemini I guess?) spits out code samples. Most run right out of the box and I am good enough at Javascript to figure why if they don’t.
I’ve used many programming languages over the years and in years past I spent hours reading, searching and experimenting to figure out thing that I now feed into google and finish in minutes what would take hours or days in the past.
I was amazed how well ask.discourse worked and eventually I got a plugin working and roughly doing what I wanted. With some styling (css) it could/may become a useable plugin. I’m intrigued with the possibility that an AI assisted service could streamline code creation
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