An eager fix

Yesterday, while looking at starting to post to my photoblog again, I noticed I'd missed a trick when I added the first and second sets of photos when I created seen-by.davep.dev: I'd left off any cover frontmatter from all of the posts!

While I doubt it's super important -- I can't imagine people will be sharing photos from the blog after all, especially not older ones -- it felt like I'd failed to use a useful feature that I'd made sure BlogMore had.

This was obviously easy to fix. I could just write a tool that would go through all of the Markdown files, find the image that is being displayed in the post, pull out the path to the file, and add a cover to the frontmatter. Not exactly the hardest thing to write, but kind of boring for a one-off fix.

So this felt like another good time to get Copilot to do the hard work. Liking this plan, I wrote an issue for the prompt and set it to work.

The result was unexpected, and in retrospect this is how I should have approached it in the first place; Copilot wrote the script, then ran it, and then submitted the PR including the script and all of the changes after running it! It's like it was super eager to do the fix so went ahead and just did it.

This, for me, highlights a trick/approach I'm still not fully mindful of: where I might once have written some throwaway code to do a job, run the code, and then made use of the result, when it comes to using an agent I always have the option of saying what I want done to the content of the repository and just let it do it.

When I'm next faced with a problem like this, I think this is the approach I'll take: rather than ask it to write the tool to do the work, I'll just say what the work is I want done and let it go about it. This feels like where an agent should shine and where it's really useful.

Meanwhile I can get on with the fun stuff.