Python Project: Blogger Spam Bulk Deleter Code Walkthrough: Pair-Coded with Claude but Human Explained!

Problem: My blog, Adventures in Automation, has collected over 11,000 spam comments over the past ten years, and unfortunately bare-bones Blogger.com does not have a bulk delete function. Through the Blogger UI, you can only delete a hundred at a time.

Pair-programming with Claude.ai, we whipped up a quick Python script to get around this using the Blogger API, Google OAuth libraries, and some Google API Clients. The errors that appeared after running the code, I fed back to Claude, who then fixed the issues, and added some setup documentation I was able to muddle through.

• Blogger Spam Bulk Deleter: https://github.com/tjmaher/blogger-spam-bulk-deleter

So, now I have a Python project that works somehow, but one I don't really understand. Since becoming an automation developer, I have worked on-the-job with Java, Ruby, JavaScript, and TypeScript, but not yet with Python.

Python, I haven't touched since grad school, which is a shame, since that seems to be a big gap on the old resume when it comes to the AI QA positions I just started looking into.

Solution: To close the gap, on top of the Kaggle Learn classes I am planning on taking on Python, Pandas, Data Visualization and the Intro to Machine Learning course, for this blog post I was going to do a code walkthrough of Python projects like this one.

Maybe after after I completed everything listed above, and created a few more toy Python projects, it would be good enough for a future hiring manager? Who knows?

When Claude Acts Like a Clod: Catching AI Fabrications: A QA Engineer's Field Notes

Image created by Bing AI, powered by DALL-E 3

Using AI as a research assistant? Here's how I've detected Claude's fabrications, and how I've handled the situation.

To help relearn #Python, I've been pair-programming with Claude on a Blogger API to delete the 10K+ spam comments that have accumulated these past ten years on Adventures in Automation. 

• Blogger Spam Bulk Deleter: https://github.com/tjmaher/blogger-spam-bulk-deleter

Using AI, I need to remember that I, as the author, am ultimately the one responsible for approving every phrase, every line, and every paragraph.

Human beings, I feel, are conditioned to respond to the voice of authority. 

Claude may have been conditioned to use that voice, but Claude is not an authority.

• Looking for technical information? Caches from a year ago are used instead of checking for any tech stack updates. 
• Need AI to recheck a web page after editing it with AI's suggestions? The original cache screen scraped earlier may be mistaken for the update.
• Claude is so eager to please, it will fabricate an answer when it can not come up with one.

Review its answers. Be skeptical. Use critical thinking. Ask it to cite its sources.

Becoming AI QA: Jupyter Notebook + Python

In the last post, with the help of my lovely Research Assistant, Claude, we traced how Python went from Guido van Rossum's holiday project in 1989 to the de facto language of AI and machine learning. 

Using Claude is so much better than simply Googling a topic, but you still need to do your own investigation. Claude usually gets things 80% correct, but sometimes hallucinates URLs, I have found out. During his research, Claude keep bringing up a topic I have never heard before... Jupyter notebooks... What, is that a typo? 

What Is a Jupyter Notebook?

According to the Project Jupyter official documentation, a Jupyter Notebook is a web-based interactive computing platform. The notebook combines live code, equations, narrative text, visualizations, and interactive dashboards into a single shareable document.

The file format is .ipynb -- short for "IPython Notebook," a holdover from the tool's origins.

A notebook is organized into cells. Each cell is either:

• Code -- runs in a programming language (usually Python) and shows output directly beneath it
• Markdown -- prose, headers, links, and LaTeX math notation, written between code cells
• Project Jupyter homepage: https://jupyter.org/
• Official Jupyter Documentation: https://docs.jupyter.org/
• Official Jupyter Blog: https://blog.jupyter.org/
• Project Jupyter on GitHub: https://github.com/jupyter

Book review: Learning Python the Hard Way

Since November 2014, I have been studying the computer programming language Python, with the free online book Learning Python the Hard Way, [link]. Written by Zed Shaw, it seems is a great way to start learning how to code or getting back into coding if it has been a while since you last programmed.

The author's premise of the book is that readers won't be able to learn how to code by just copy-and-paste the Python code from the online book into a text editor. Zed encourages, demands, wheedles, nags, and hectors his viewing audience that in order to really learn the Python language (or any programming language for that matter) they need to: