This is a great write-up, and I've had similar experiences in domain specific scaffolding (using GPT-4 directly rather than Smoll-AI and I was creating Odoo extensions rather than VSCode).
That said, I think some of your takeaways are more criticisms of Smoll-AI than GPT-4:
> there are no instructions on how to develop, use, or publish the extension
... Because you didn't ask for instructions. All it would take is one more prompt to get these.
> there is no .gitignore for typescript/javascript/vscode artifacts
> there is no launch.json file that configures running the extension in development
Given the prompts it's fair to expect these should have been created. But again, since you already demonstrated some domain specific knowledge is required, when you see something like this is missing from the original prompt then you need to ask for it in a new prompt.
> there are no tests
I think we're seeing a pattern here. Did you ask for tests? In defense of the AI here, I think very few human coders would be writing tests in such an early stage of development.
> there is no code reuse
This one is fair. But I wonder if you fed all the original code in - I guess it would fit in one 32k context? - and asked it to find code reuse possibilities (and bugs while we're at it), what would you get?
In my specific case, Odoo modules are pretty unusual, the default scaffolding is barely existant, the documentation is not great. I haven't found any useable alternative starter templates either.
Beside that, it's also hard to use other Odoo modules s references because there's some weird thing where Odoo decided to recreate an old version of React that uses XML rather than JSX. They call it OWL. But they've only partially migrated so modules are mixed between that and I think at least two older styles. Oh, and some time in the past they decided to invent their own version of JS modules too. It's a mess.
Oh yeah, and I'm using Odoo 16 while nearly everything else I can find is for Odoo 15, 14, or 13, and there have been a lot of technical changes between those versions.
I've been programming professionally for about 15 years and this is one of the most tangled pieces of spaghetti I've ever had to unravel. There's just too many threads to easily keep them in my head at once, and very little in the way of tutorials.
In this situation, for all it's faults, GPT-4 does a great job as an assistant. It genuinely is better than the alternatives I have available - even though it's also limited in knowledge of Odoo 16 which was released after the training date.
That said, I think some of your takeaways are more criticisms of Smoll-AI than GPT-4:
> there are no instructions on how to develop, use, or publish the extension
... Because you didn't ask for instructions. All it would take is one more prompt to get these.
> there is no .gitignore for typescript/javascript/vscode artifacts
> there is no launch.json file that configures running the extension in development
Given the prompts it's fair to expect these should have been created. But again, since you already demonstrated some domain specific knowledge is required, when you see something like this is missing from the original prompt then you need to ask for it in a new prompt.
> there are no tests
I think we're seeing a pattern here. Did you ask for tests? In defense of the AI here, I think very few human coders would be writing tests in such an early stage of development.
> there is no code reuse
This one is fair. But I wonder if you fed all the original code in - I guess it would fit in one 32k context? - and asked it to find code reuse possibilities (and bugs while we're at it), what would you get?