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