#478 GoodGifts
Using Copilot CLI to build a simple app to find gift suggestions based on my 5-star reviews and their Goodreads wishlist.
Notes
I did it again: gifted a book that someone already had.
Crazy thing is we both use Goodreads and I even used it to pick the book from my recent reads, but failed to check if they had already read it.
Goodreads itself has a friend bookshelf comparison feature, but it doesn’t (currently) make it easy to pluck out recommendations.
So, time to build a little app for that?
Building with Copilot CLI
I was keen to use this as a case study with the new Github Copilot CLI. Up to now, my Github Copilot use largely been restricted to simple changes within vscode.
So I went about building the app…and it did a pretty good job!
I used about 10 prompts in total, and my only manual interventions were around the edges:
- tidy and expand the README
- manually fix some text content
- replace the docker control shell script with one based on other work
I did need to read and review the code to identify areas where the AI hadn’t done quite the right thing, and one bug had me investigating at quite a technical level to figure out how to prompt for a valid fix.
I am using the free Copilot plan, so this cost me nothing to build except perhaps an hour of two of my time.
How can this remain free and still so functional?? But while it lasts, this seems an excellent Claude-lite experience at no cost!
The App
See the source at https://github.com/tardate/goodgifts, the README has all the information about the app and how to run it. Or just run the Docker image.
Ideally, I would have liked this to be a single-page web app, but CORS restrictions prevent that from being a possibility.
Credits and References
- https://www.goodreads.com/
- https://github.com/tardate/goodgifts - source repo
- https://hub.docker.com/r/tardate/goodgifts - Docker image