Just when you least expected it, they will screw you.

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 I was using Visual Studio Code with Gemini Code Assist to create a variation of an existing Python script. After a few minutes of back and forth, I got the desired code running. But when I try to run the same script again on the terminal, nothing happens. WTF? Thankfully, I asked Gemini to rebuild the file for me, and a few moments later, I got it back into my VSC editor. However, a minute later, the issue repeats itself. 

What good is it to have an IA to write code for you if the file content with the code disappears seconds or minutes later? And it's not that the file disappears, it is just that suddenly the file becomes 0 bytes long. When asked about it, Gemini hinted that, as I was working on a Dropbox folder, it might be a known synchronization issue of Dropbox. Knowing the possible cause of the problem helps, but being a paying customer of Dropbox makes me wonder if I want to keep on supporting them. This is not the first weird issue I have had with them, but other problems were happening on Linux on OSX; this time, it is in Windows.

I cannot rule out Git playing also a role here, as the problem was easily repeatable as long as the file was untracked, but once I added the file (being quick enough to commit before its content disappeared), the content of the file did not go away after I saved it from VSC.  The bottom line is that a five-minute IA thing turned into forty-five minutes of fighting with the computer. Computers will help us, they said.




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