[eclipse.org-architecture-council] Example of agentic coding beyond quic

[Christoph Läubrich <laeubi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

As we have discussed the topic recently and Wayne came up with the 
question "Why should I want another quicksort", I thought I should share 
a more valuable example using (copilot) AI Agent coding.

For the context, a while back I proposed to dependabot[1] (what many of 
you likely know and use here and there) the support for Eclipse-PDE 
Feature files update [2] and it was finally merged after a long time, 
but that it takes that long also has a reason that dependabot is written 
in ruby that I'm not very familiar with.
Beside that I need to setup a dev-environment getting used to the tools 
and codestyles and in the end came up with something but it was quite a 
convoluted process and then the team changed a lot --> merge conflicts :-\

Today I came up with an idea, for a feature I quite often use but 
dependabot sadly do not support and asked the AI agent to implement it 
for me [3], you can see my prompt if you expand the "Original prompt" 
section in the PR. The session took about 36 minutes and when you look 
at the commits you see copilot-agent has used copilot-codereview to 
improve its own results but this all happens automatic.

The result looks like something that can be a good starting point and at 
least not more worse than what I can cam up with my limited ruby skills, 
so lets see what the maintainers think now Copilot has even followed the 
PR template so I can easily create a PR from it here [4].

So from idea to a working PR in about an hour for a project I'm not that 
familiar with is not that bad and I could focus on the high-level 
problem and verification of the results than on the details of ruby 
syntax and robocup style complains.

For Wayne I also added a small disclaimer here in the PR and hope such 
things would be suitable for an Eclipse Project as well :-)

best
 Christoph

[1] https://github.com/dependabot
[2] https://github.com/dependabot/dependabot-core/pull/6913
[3] https://github.com/laeubi/dependabot-core/pull/1
[4] https://github.com/dependabot/dependabot-core/pull/13774