Microsoft 365 Community PowerShell, 14 Aug 2023

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From YouTube: Using ChatGPT (or your favorite AI) to speed up PowerShell Development

Description

📺 In this 12-minute developer-focused demo, Todd Klindt addresses the fundamentals - what is AI? How can AI help me write better code? What 2 tools are used by the speaker and for what purpose? GitHub Copilot - $10/month. ChatGPT - Chat with it, know that it compliments GitHub Copilot - $20 a month. Speaker prompts both AI assistants for information and refines results. Interesting usage research referenced.

This PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development Community call recorded on June 22, 2023.

✨ Demo Presenter
• Todd Klindt (Sympraxis Consulting) | @ToddKlindt

💬 Community Call Conversation
• aka.ms/June22-Demo3

📖 Supporting materials
• Tool - Your AI pair programmer (GitHub Copilot) | https://github.com/features/copilot
• Article - Research: quantifying GitHub Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness | https://github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-copilots-impact-on-developer-productivity-and-happiness/

💡 Learn more about the Microsoft 365 & Power Platform community
• Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
• Microsoft 365 & Power Platform - http://aka.ms/community/home

Sharing is caring! You are awesome! 🧡

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Trying to get as much stuff in as I can y'all have me in teams feel free to reach out. I would love to talk about any of this, um so this is my contact. Information y'all are bored of Tears with who I am uh the important thing? Is my email address there? If you have questions reach out hit me up on Twitter, whatever smoke signals, uh you all know how to get a hold of me. So this is the quick agenda.

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I'm gonna spend like a little bit talking about AI, not because I know a lot about AI, but I want to level set and just make sure we're all talking about the same things. Then I'm going to talk about a couple of the tools that I use. There are a bazillion tools out there.

A

I currently use like two or three: that's the only ones I want to talk about the other ones are probably great, uh very smart loved by one and all they're, just not the ones that have caught my eye and then I'll uh I'll show you a couple of things and Paul I remember on Tuesday I told you I was going to give you a script sample that will be in the the demos, so so keep keep on attention. Keep your attention up. So what is AI artificial intelligence? The field of AI is really big.

A

There are a bunch of pick pieces of AI we're only going to talk about really three pieces of it: uh the natural language processing, the machine learning and the neural Nets and I put the the the abbreviations in their initialisms just so we can see them um so the natural language processing is the ability for the AI to understand the messy human stuff that we put in machine learning is ai's ability to take a corpus of things uh with some humans showing it.

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You know this is a picture of a dog that says a picture of a dog. This isn't a picture of a dog, give it a few of those sets, and then it goes off and learns the rest on itself and then a human comes back later and adjusts it, and then neural networks is kind of how it pieces that together, I was listening to a podcast about uh language, a while back and they're talking about the word network literally means a work like a work of art or whatever that looks like a net.

A

That is, a network had never thought of it that way, but the neural networks are all the little pieces of things the machine language knows and how it connects them, and that's how it's going to do some of the crazy stuff uh that I'm going to show you here in a minute. The thing to keep in mind is For, Better or Worse.

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Ai learns like humans do so it looks at things that other humans are doing and then tries to take a current situation and extrapolate from the things that it's seen, uh what the the right thing is to do, depending on which humans it's learning from, or sometimes it's just wrong. So that's the thing to keep in mind.

A

Sometimes AI is just not right, but it does learn like humans and it's funny because I've seen some criticism of AI like especially Dolly the the image thing- and it said uh hey you know all it does is it just know, steals other people's art and then changes a little bit and makes it its own and I heard that and I'm like that is every piece of art ever that is every story. That's ever been written every painting, that's ever been done.

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Every script I've ever written, has been going out and looking at what other people have done, taking it and then changing it to be the thing that I need so again for Better or For Worse.

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That's what uh what AI is and chat GPT uh the the Big Daddy all of them, essentially what it did is it read the internet in September of 2021, the whole thing um and then a combination of machine learning and all that kind of stuff understood the internet in uh September of 2021, and that's what you get when you talk to. It is what it what it knew back then, with a couple of exceptions. So how can AI help me and help you write better code?

A

Well, I, really like the nomenclature, the GitHub and Microsoft use um in that they call it copilot and that's really what it is. It is it's sitting next to you, you're still in charge, you're still the pilot. You still have to write the code and do whatever, but it's sitting next to you, helping you out and I think that's a really uh a really great way to to look at what it does for you and that's all of AI. uh The way I.

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Think of it is kind of like my my GPS and my car, like I put my destination in and I'm roughly follow it. But if my GPS tells me to run off a cliff or something I usually take the wheel and I don't do that. Ai is the same way. It's kind of your co-pilot um I've found that I get the best value from AI on a topic that I already know a little bit so I use AI with Powershell every day of the week.

A

Sometimes multiple days times in the day on the weekends uh and it works great and I've done some amazing things: I couldn't use AI to Learn Python, for instance, or machine. You know Assembly Language or anything like that. You need to have some understanding of of the product, because the the thing you're doing for a few different reasons, number one. When you're talking to AI, um you need to be able to create good prompts.

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You need to be able to give it good things, and so prompts are the thing that you type and then it replies to you. So you need to be able to use. You know the right terms and things like that, uh so that the AI has a chance of figuring out what you, what you're going to do. The other thing is AI like humans. They get stuff wrong in the AI World. Those are called hallucinations, which I think is just a hysterical word for it.

A

uh But you need to know enough about the subject to know. When you see a hallucination um and the other thing is you need to you know, you need to do your own work. So, there's recently a story here in the last couple weeks of some lawyers in the United States to use chat GP to write a summary for a case, and they just you know, control a control, C, send it off and it cited a whole bunch of stuff and made some great claims. The problem is, uh none of it was true.

A

They didn't check anything uh chat. Gpt made the whole thing up, so you gotta, you gotta, understand what you're doing um so. What I found is that the best benefit comes from it being able to do things help you do things you could already do faster or iterate on them. Just a little bit. Take them up the next level and if you learn one thing from this session um other than that I can talk really fast. It's that uh you should never talk yourself out of asking an AI something.

A

So people in the chat are talking about how it you know, they've tried, stuff and didn't work, there's no penalty for that. Like there's nobody, judging you for that once twice a week, I have some idea and I say: I should ask chat GPT about that nah! It's too convoluted chat, GPS you'll never be able to make heads or tails of that and then I talk myself into it and once or twice a week it does it. It figures it out.

A

It just amazes me and that's for a couple reasons: number one: the AI is really good, but number two we've all heard of this rubber duck debugging, where you have a rubber duck on your desk and you explain to it the problem, just the thought of working through the question to ask the AI often Jiggles through um uh the the solution in your head, so that helps you out a lot.

A

um So the other mentioned in the chat room. The chat GPT is really good. At making up Powershell commands uh it is chaggy. Pt4 is a little better than three and three point five, but yeah. You definitely need to uh to be careful with it. Okay, so which tools do I use, I, use two tools: I use, GitHub copilot and chat. Gbt uh GitHub co-pilot is inside of your IDE I use it in vs code and it's kind of like the next evolution of intellisense or or suggestions, or things like that.

A

Basically, you start typing, it starts churning away and it suggests things and if you like the thing it suggests you hit tab. If you don't, you just keep typing and you ignore it, but it's basically just watching over your shoulder seeing what you're doing um it. It's got a lot of power, it's it has access to GitHub. So it's learning from that. It's looking inside of the document that you're in to see what it can figure out.

A

It's also looking at the other documents you have open in your tabs, so it helps if you open up your whole project and it can kind of see uh the whole picture. There's a really great GitHub study in here I would love to spend time talking about it, but I don't have a the up. The opportunity to do right now check that link out.

A

The big thing is what that study proved well showed because you know GitHub did it was that GitHub copilot helps people do things they could already do about 50 faster and um uh more of them. So 78 were able to finish the thing with AI 70 or not. It costs about 10 bucks a month which I know seems like that's.

A

You know what I pay for YouTube or whatever you will get your ten dollars a month back in the first week, if you're like me and a consultant, then you build by the hour you'll get it in the first day. uh So so don't be afraid to do that. So, let's uh take a quick look.

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um Okay, so this is the thing there's an extension. You want to install that extension over here uh and it's called GitHub Copilot.

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You install that this is the little guy over here. You'll see it working. So if I do a new document, that's not what I wanted. If I do a new document- okay, oh it did work all right um pick. The language Powershell is not one of the like top languages that it uses, but it still understands that it can still uh do a bunch of stuff. So basically you can do things like I can type. You know, connect to SharePoint online with PNP Powershell hit return.

A

You can see it down here churning now with this one. It's funny. So this is you know doing. Demos is scary, doing demos with a non-deterministic thing like this is tough. um It's going to give me the wrong thing. It's going to give me the documentation, which is nice, uh but last week it was giving me the connection string um so that wasn't helpful, get all the lists in a SharePoint site. Oh okay, good, uh but I. Don't like that! I! Don't like that! I want something else.

A

uh Get me all the non-hidden lists in a SharePoint site there we go so there's things like that, so you can see it cranking out the code for you. um It does that and as you're typing code um it will, uh you know, do it in the code. It will do it from comments. The other great thing is this helps you, uh you know, have better comments on your code and it's just not going to do that. One thanks a lot Chachi from Team all right.

A

So let's go back to the slide because we got uh so chat. Gpt is more of a chat thing. uh I use it in a compliment with a GitHub copilot I write some code, then I throw in chat. Gbt uh chat, gbt I, absolutely just put crazy stuff in there, and so let me demo that here, quick and and Paul. This is the code uh that you will get I'm gonna end my slideshow here, quick, so I can get to my window or ignore all that.

A

Oh there's all this one, okay, so here's chat, GPT, I'm, picking four I'm, picking that so I'm gonna put this uh prompt in here write a function called Fix SharePoint, the uh on a site using Powershell PMP Powershell. Have it look for a list called Shane stinks that Shane Young. He was my sidekick for a while and created if it's not there, okay. So this is what it's going to do for me.

A

I think that's uh big enough copy code you're going to like that button because you just copy it back in so it creates a function. So this is while this is churning through uh and Paul. This is your demo that you can have. um This is one of the things I do I write. Powershell then I pop it in here and I'm. Like turn this into a function called Blah, add a parameter, blah write me three examples blah and it just does it so it takes the code that I would already write.

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Elevates it up a little bit, so everything I write now takes pipeline input is a function, has examples, and it takes me about two minutes at the end. um It's there's just nothing to it. So now, not only does it write the code, it uh explains it to me. uh This will end up inside, so there we go. That is that, so let me get over I can't wait.

A

So Shane Shane was going to come in and watch this today, but he's busy with uh with the presentation on site so I was I was going to Spring that one on him uh that's 20 bucks. A month uh best 20 bucks, I've spent uh in a long time, I I write that check every month, smiling so again. There's your stuff. uh One minute left hit me up. I'd love to chat about it. Vesa back to you excellent right on time.