Has anyone subjected their code to Claude for an analysis? I recently pushed a 100k .bas file thru it and in return receiving a list of ~100 logic errors, some of which were valid, some were not.
I then asked Claude to write an alternative code and what it produced was incredibly close to the original in 25k - but it wasn't 100% compilable by PB. This stuff is going to make us old dinasours all totally redundant.
05.10.2026, 23:17 (This post was last modified: 05.10.2026, 23:24 by Dale Yarker.)
Quote:... but it wasn't 100% compilable by PB
Who is going fix the last few percent? And how do they stay proficient to do it with out continued practice?
Has anyone else read the Isaac Asimov short story about this situation?
In fact at least 2 stories. Battlestar Galactica type fighters that kept losing till they took control back from the autopilot, and a young person that rediscovered how to do 2 + 2 manually and arithmetic in general.
OK, after about 4 hours of first meeting this AI tool called Claude, here is what I asked it to do:
"Please create me a Powerbasic .bas file with a UI for an empty database to hold surname, first name/s, date of birth, gender and NHS number."
The attached code was produced which compiled perfectly.
In Claude written database - should not call DIALOG END CBHNDL under %WM_CLOSE, because it actually causes the program to crash-stop in a loop of WM_CLOSE calls where it chrashes completely before WM_DESTROY is reached. MS Spy reveals.
There are some other issues too, like trying to add a patient with invalid NHS number fails without telling why and there is no error checking at file operations, etc. No need to declare procedures ahead of PBMAIN anymore and we have learned that it's safest to use MODELESS program loop for this kind of "one dialog" app's in Windows 10 and later.
I personally would not use AI for anything, because I prefer to have full control of my code from start to goal, but I can see where companies will think this is fine and so - I guess it means we can expect to se lots of buggy software in the future. Grumpy old programmer mode on...
(06.10.2026, 13:00)Dan Soper Wrote: Someone has to write the code for AI training to plagiarise.
Well not so as AI teaches itself and that's my point - it seems to be capable of learning all on its own. Plagarise is not a word that AI knows or even cares about. Noone has written any code to specifically teach it to deal with a PB request such as my request. Yes the code will be buggy but as time progresses, that will improve and at a rate that few appreciate. I will submit the code it produced and ask for it to improve it - let's see what happens then....
Of course there are massive risks here - I've asked it to do a few nefarious things like hack this or hack that (to discover the response) and there are boundaries with Claude where it refuses. But who is to say that those boundaries will prevail in the future? I'm an old-school programmer who has denied the existence of AI for long enough and having decided to play with it am astounded (and concerned).
The combination of DeepSeek 1.4 and OpenCode is really good if you’re willing to give it access to the project folder. Then it can compile test code on your computer. If you can turn the PB help file into an HTML file or something it can read, it would do a lot better.
It can do things you wouldn’t have the time or patience to do. I wanted 256-bit floating point for FB, I got it. If I mess with C, I want dynamic arrays for all number types. I used DeepSeek to build a dynamic array for one number type. Do the edge test. With one prompt, I had it refactor the code for all C number types along with the test code.
You can have less buggy software because you can tell it to test all procedures with all possible edge cases. You keep an eye on it; you use it to keep an eye on you.
It’s kind of fun to do the easy stuff and have somebody else to do all the boring and tedious code, are extremely complex code that I no longer have the patience to deal with.
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Reverse engineering is almost 100% for some software, with AI and other tools. Folks pulling a character out of one game and putting it in another game.
