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Colour-coded error turns red in terminal, with Gemini AI providing an explanation of the error
Inspiration
CompileSafe was created with student programmers in mind. After hours of trying to understand error messages, both the eyes and mind need a little break!
What it does
Our program works as a VSCode extension that captures error messages, returns them in a simple-to-understand language, and highlights errors/warnings in the terminal as red/blue for easier reading.
How we built it
CompileSafe was built using JavaScript through VSCode and the Gemini AI API to take in error messages and return a clearer version.
Challenges we ran into
We jumped into our project head first and really underestimated it at first. Although I have absolutely no regrets in our project topic, I do believe that a big challenge we faced throughout was getting overexcited. We tried to run before we could crawl in several different aspects. At first we didn't even realize the problem posed with using an API and how you need a key. After not getting this set up we tried to host our key in a server with Vercel, without testing it locally first, which led to major problems in testing/debugging. Additionally, the LLMs we had consulted had given us false information that we did not fact check, leading to us trying to use deprecated models of Gemini (i.e. version 1.0).
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of creating a full application and learned more about the general format of our extension. We all did something completely new both in style of programming and content wise. For example, part of the group worked on the extension and accessibility features while the other part worked on getting AI integrated. We are extremely proud of creating a working end product but more importantly, how much we learned from this experience. We got to see and become more familiar with the layout of integrating API's and the core concepts behind coding. We are really proud of the amount of growth we gained from this experience. We are really proud of our teamwork skills, we didn't know everyone beforehand and yet everyone agreed that the project wouldn't have been completed without the support of one another.
What we learned
We learned that it is good to ask for help. It can feel awkward to ask for help however we feel we would have regretted it if we had not asked for help. Several of us realized that when asking for help it's not just about learning about syntax and what the error is saying, it also provides information on how to solve a problem. We learned about where we went wrong, not necessarily by literal code but in our rush to solve a problem. We learned the importance in slowing down and not getting overwhelmed. We got a bit more comfortable with failure and saying that we don't understand several things. Since our program hit essentially rock bottom we learned so much more than if everything went well.
What's next for CompileSafe
In the future, we would like to further simplify error messages for increased efficiency as well as incorporate more compiled languages compatible with the extension. We would also like to set up a server instead of a local host that way our users would not have to install the framework Node.js in order to run CompileSafe.
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