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More on the surprisingly awesome power of AI in coding for hydrology

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After the last post ( https://horritt.blogspot.com/2025/04/llms-for-coding-surprisingly-helpful.html ) describing my first foray into using AIs for coding, I've been using Claude a lot more. It's now my go-to starting point for any "blank page" projects, and for a lot of reuse of existing code too. Earlier this week I was reminded of the NRFA API. For non-hydrologists the NRFA is the National River Flow Archive, which hosts a load of useful information from gauging stations in the UK. And for non-programmers, an API is an Application Programming Interface which tells us how to write code to access this information.   Accessing this data is the sort of thing I'd usually have to set aside half a day to get my head round - so I thought I'd see if an LLM could help speed up this process. The NRFA has provided a really detailed description ( https://nrfaapps.ceh.ac.uk/nrfa/nrfa-api.html ) of the API - so I've given that to Claude and asked for a library to acce...
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LLMs for coding - surprisingly helpful

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There's been a lot of talk about AI, and specifically LLMs (large language models, like ChatGPT). Much of this talk is polarised into "it's going to change the world (and perhaps make me redundant)" to "it's massively over-hyped and is essentially useless". I probably sat towards the over-hyped end of this spectrum, until I started properly trying to use an LLM to help with coding. I got into this through this excellent article from The Guardian, which led me to this article by Simon Willison, which includes a lot of sage advice on how to get the most out of LLMs for programming. Like most tools, to get the most out of it you have to know how to use it, and understand its limitations. One useful way of thinking about this is that the LLM is good at coding - leaving you to think about the programming. Simon Willison likens the LLM to an intern - you might have to specify in detail what you want them to do, but they (mostly) will be able to do it. If you...
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