Am I missing updates?

[metervisaprone]

Hi. I've been using pythonista for a little while, having initially tried to make a 'sharable' app using Swift Playground and finding it too restrictive. Pythonista has been a brilliant alternative, and I'm glad to see that there's still development going on.

My question is whether there are any updates that I've missed, particularly with the UI module. I've recently asked one of the AIs to help me generate some code, and it uses commands that I don't think exist - specifically "ui.get_window()". When I question it, it's quite adamant that it exists and I must be using an older version of Pythonista! I suspect it's just hallucinating, but it did make me wonder if there were updates somewhere that I was missing out on. I'd have thought the app as a whole would update from the Apple Store, but are there any independently available updates to the built-in modules (like UI). How would I know?

Thanks,

Pete C.

[omz]

You haven't missed any updates, ChatGPT is just gaslighting you... LLMs have a tendency to invent non-existent functions in libraries that aren't extremely popular. Honestly, it's kind of amazing that ChatGPT is even aware of Pythonista-specific stuff, but I wouldn't trust it too much with the details...

[cvpe]

Hi Ole,
I'm also surprised that ChatGPT knows Pythonista and even its bridge to ObjectiveC. I have used it once and after some corrections, its code was working as asked.

[metervisaprone]

Good to know, Ole, thanks.

I admit I was also surprised that it (I've used ChatGPT, Copilot and Lumo - not sure if they're all the same at base?) was Pythonista-aware! But it produces some pretty good bits of code, although they usually (I think) initially fail through things like using non-existent functions like get_window. But point this out and ask it to correct itself and eventually (after a few passes maybe) I get something usable. Saves a bit of the donkey-work at least.

[cvpe]

ui.get_window_size() exists.

personally, I prefer to use Copilot than ChatGPT

[RichardPotthoff]

I have had good experiences with Grok and Pythonista. Here is Grok's response to Pete's problem:
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk%3D_d00c95e6-56de-4027-b4d0-80906b32ca57

[metervisaprone]

Oooo interesting. I haven't tried Grok. I'll try feeding it my original prompt and see if it gives me a better first answer (for interest, it was to create a 'slide-in' component - e.g. select an item in a tableview and a view with additional info on that item temporarily slides in over the top)

[metervisaprone]

For info, had a quick try and I think that was probably the best 'first attempt' result to date. Not perfect, but close and it worked first time. However, added a little bit more complexity and it tripped up.
Still better than me though :-)

[mmccthomas]

I would agree with the above comments.
I have been using AI (my preference was for Google Gemini) to produce some classic games in Pythonista.
The results have been pretty creditable. I have a repo at https://github.com/mmccthomas/Pythonista_games/tree/main/AI_Games

All of the AIs do suffer from hallucinations, they particularly confuse the scene and ui modules, and assume modules which are not present, such as pygame and scipy. It is usually very apparent what is intended, and workarounds applied.
However, Pythonista is very well supported by the AIs.
Note also that AI is very good at reviewing code, pointing out errors, structure and standards compliance.

My only worry is how much this short-circuits the learning process for new coders. It still requires some skill and experience to review and debug produced code. Over-reliance on AI can make this skill level difficult to acquire.