After last weekend’s experiments with local LLMs, ChatGPT, and GitHub Copilot, I decided to change up what I was doing a bit. Instead of asking the bots to do something I already know how to do, I asked them to do something I didn’t already know how to do:

Create a Powershell function to convert a Mermaid-formatted Markdown file into a PNG without using mermaid-cli.

This time around, I was much more satisfied with the results. I got the basics of a function and was able to massage it into something I could actually use.

The results are here: https://github.com/TrimarcJake/MermaidToPng

Since I am still very new in my development journey, I simply don’t know what I don’t know. Using Copilot has allowed me to explore ideas I know should be possible without having to tons of pages on Microsoft Learn to figure out exactly which .NET classes I should be using.

However, the true killer app for me is using Copilot to create comment-based help for EVERYTHING.