It’s been a few years since I’ve seen one in the wild, but I’ve known a few IT guys who liked to rock a shirt with some variant of “Be nice to me or I will replace you with a shell script” emblazoned across the chest.

Here’s an example, stolen from Amazon:

Now, I’ve always felt that this was a little misanthropic, though that’s certainly nothing new when it comes to the particular line of work I’m in.  Being in IT / computer security / development / nerd stuff in general, we tend to get a bit of a sense that our contributions are not properly appreciated and rewarded, and that lends itself naturally to fostering a bit of bitterness.

And, occasionally, this sort of mentality is very accurate.  In my last position, I needed to get data from a spreadsheet that was supposed to update on Mondays, but that would occasionally update later in the week for no apparent reason.  Sometimes, it would even skip a week.  I eventually got annoyed enough by this to dig into it, and it came out that the spreadsheet needed input from a different system and that the process for getting data from that system into the spreadsheet was that a particular employee needed to hand-copy the values from system A into spreadsheet B, and they were the only employee with access to both, so if they were out of the office it didn’t get done.

That could absolutely have been scripted.

Now, I’ve never owned a shirt like this, and I don’t do a ton of scripting.  But I do some!  Occasionally I put up a post on this site talking about some new challenge I have faced and solved, generally with a lot of reading Stack Overflow and parsing through man pages.  It makes me feel very satisfied.

The post I put up just the other day, for instance, with me talking about how I had figured out how to use ffmpeg to add a new font to an mkv file?  Peak satisfaction.

…and then I made the mistake of getting curious.

I’ve used Microsoft’s Copilot to help debug scripts in the past.  How would it perform with something like ffmpeg?  Surely that software, while very useful in a specific domain, would also be fairly obscure?

…oh dear.  That would have saved me a lot of time.

So I was a little shaken, and then I made the mistake of asking for Copilot’s help with something else.  See, I have about 30,000 downloaded comic books in .cbz format, and they are not named in any particularly-consistent way.  I’ve been kind of mentally playing around with a script to normalize the filenames, but have hit so many edge cases and little frustrations that it’s never gotten off the ground.  I’ve probably devoted 3 or 4 hours to this, without a single line of usable code emerging from the thought process.

It did take me a few attempts before I managed to describe exactly what I wanted to Copilot’s satisfaction, but that was a few minutes, at most 10, and what came out of it was a working and (and this is even more vexing) COMMENTED shell script that did precisely what I wanted.

So, yeah.  I’m still clinging to a tiny shred of self-worth, because I did need to describe what I wanted, and being able to describe a problem well is probably a skill of its own, but boy did I get taken down a few pegs.