I just asked excel to write a unit test and it just sat there.

I know you're probably just being obtuse (or feigning that you don't know what I mean), but I'm gonna act as if you're being genuine, just in case.

First off, I don't ask LLMs to write unit tests. They suck at it. They don't consider edge cases. They lie. They use the wrong test frameworks. They make tests that pass without actually checking what they say they check.

For writing unit tests, I use my general purpose tool - me, the developer.

So, let's assume unit tests are out, and I want to write other forms of code which are much more predictable. Excel is perfect for those.

I explicitly don't ask Excel (or any of the other tools I mentioned) to write code, because, like LLMs, the code it would write (if it could write code) is garbage.

I explicitly define the specific transformations I want. I treat the code as data, and ask the data manipulation tool to transform the data to another format (which happens to be code).

For example, let's suppose I want to transform this code:

public sealed record Person(
    string FirstName, 
    string LastName
);

Into this:

new Person(
    FirstName: firstName,
    LastName: lastName
)

1. I paste the "from" code into column A in excel.
2. Column B gets a formula
3. Fill column B down.
4. Paste column B into my IDE.
5. Repeat steps 1 and 4 for each thing I need to transform.

I have excel files already saved for the common transformations that I do.

(If the formula are simple enough (just a few minutes), I'll redo it from scratch each time....)

For this example, the formula in question would be something like this (forgive any mistakes, I typed this on my phone, since I'm not at my laptop where I have everything saved)

=IF(
    A1="", 
    "", 
    SWITCH(
        MID(A1, 1, 1), 
        ")", ");", 
        " ", LET(
            isLast, MID(A2, 1, 1) = ")", 
            propertyName, TEXTAFTER(A1, " ", -1), 
            firstLetter, MID(propertyName, 1, 1),
            lowerLetter, LOWER(firstLetter), 
            nameRemainder, MID(propertyName, 2, 1000),
            lowerName, CONCAT(lowerLetter, nameRemainder), 
            maybeComma, IF(isLast, "", ","), 
            CONCAT(propertyName, ":", lowerName, maybeComma)
        ),
        CONCAT(
            "new ", 
            TRIM(
                TEXTAFTER(A1, "record")
        )
    )
)

The one I saved to my computer handles more edge cases - attributes, comments, etc. There's also a version that will put the property type as a comment after the property, which is handy when the type isn't evident from the name.

So this:

public sealed record Person( // This is a person
    [JsonPropertyName("firstName")] 
    // This is someone's first name
    string FirstName, 
    [JsonPropertyName("lastName")] 
    string LastName // This is the last name
);

Would get turned into this:

new Person(
    FirstName: firstName, // string
    LastName: lastName // string
)

You said you have tools that can do these tasks but all you’ve given me is tools that require me to do the task.

You know, (almost) every time I complain about LLMs fucking things up, I get one of these responses (or something like it):

1. "You need to prompt better"
2. So I have to do more work. Which is precisely what you're saying you don't want to do.
3. There's a limit to how much you can provide in your instructions files.
4. By the time I craft the perfect instruction file, I'd already be done with the task.
5. You need to provide more context
6. I'm already providing enough context
7. LLMs do worse if you give it more context
8. "Which model/agent are you using?"
9. Now my work is shifting from what I like to do (code) to what I don't want to do (experiment with a bunch of agents/models)
10. My work has the one they pay for. Anything else, I'm paying out of pocket. So, there's only one that I'm going to ever use, so it doesn't matter what you say.

Basically, they all boil down to:

"Do less work writing code by doing more work fiddling with LLMs"