AI Experience with D

[harakim]

I finally got a Claude account for myself and decided to rewrite 
a program to create USB drives for my car stereo. My old one was 
command line driven and was hard to use.

I was hesitant to use D because there is more documentation for 
C, Java, C# or python (claude sure loves python!) And this was 
going to involve UI libraries, which are rarer still.

I used Gemini to work through some of the specs (3ish minutes) 
and came up with a plan to use GTK-D (it also suggested raylib 
and dlangui). I built a 3 pane editor for the file explorer, the 
albums pane and a playlist pane. This is due to how my car stereo 
reads USBs and I won't get into it here.

My experience: Claude had no trouble with D. This was vastly 
different than my experience at work in C#. Even the simple 
python scripts it generates often have issues though it can 
usually resolve them without intervention. For D, every time it 
was done, I ran the program and it worked, with only one 
exception. To be clear, this is significantly better than my 
experience at work (2 different companies, both on claude).

In the entire time I was developing this program, there was only 
one issue running and it was with GTK-D. Claude assumed that some 
iterator would be initialized but it was not. All I had to do was 
dump the program output from bash back into Claude and it looked 
at the source in the dub folder and fixed it.

The 3 pane UI took just over 20 dollars but did take about an 
hour wall-time while I was doing other things like folding socks. 
Generating the json export file and outputting is very simple so 
I'm expecting about 25 dollars and a little over an hour for a 
complete application.

The only time my developer skills were necessary were when I 
asked Gemini which UI library to use (I know UI libraries exist) 
and then knowing enough to paste the bash output of the app with 
the error into claude.

So I will have a completely functional app to copy music to my 
car for about 25 dollars and I didn't even need to understand 
code to do it. This was significantly better than what I get with 
C# and would have been unthinkable just over a year ago.

I am an infrequent visitor this days, but I wanted to share this 
as a bit of good news.