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To be honest, you can make most bots with a little bit of programming knowledge and a good starter guide. Unfortunately, I've seen no starter guides for Lemmy bots.
Edit: actually Lemmy bot code looks insanely simple. Maybe I'll make a guide myself https://github.com/tracyspacy/ai-tldr-bot-lemmy/blob/main/tldr.py
Wow. This. Exactly this. The code looks straightforward. I was too worried for nothing. I thought I had to have like proper proper computer/data science knowledge for it, but the here has given me something to do while I struggle with another sleepless night. Thanks
If you're familiar with python, have a look at pythorhead, it's a lemmy library
What bot are you looking for?
I second Python. Probably the easiest full-fledged general-purpose programming language to learn. Plenty of reddit bots used to be written in Python. The "praw" module used to make it very easy. I'm sure pythorhead has similiar ambitions. In regard to the question: I have heard good things about "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" (no, i am not affliated with either author or publisher) : Link
as you have basic programming knowledge chatgpt will probably help enough to do what you want
I want heavily discourage using chatgpt for anything learning-related. It hallucinates often, randomly, and very convincingly, and you wouldn't have enough experience to spot when it lies.
Doesn’t chatgpt’s data only scratch till 2021? A lot has probably changed in that timeframe.
Err... not really? Python is a mature programming language which is more-or-less the same experience to write code within compared with 2 years ago. A few comfort features might have been added in that time, but all of the core stuff has been cemented in place for quite a long time now.
Yes, ChatGPT will struggle if you ask it something very domain-specific (e.g.: "write an example app for posting to Lemmy"), but it can be a great tutor if you stick to broader queries (e.g.: "write a boilerplate Python commandline application", "add a --help argument to this existing argparse code", "why am I getting an undefined variable error in this code?")
Oh yeah. My goldfish brain forgot I could have asked chatgpt, even with it’s random inconsistencies. Thanks for the reminder (I’m not being sarcastic btw)
I think a good place to start is: what are you going to run it on? You'll need to leave it on all the time, so probably your laptop.
Once you have some hardware to run the bot on, you'll want to find a bot project to build and deploy on your hardware. I put most of my software projects on GitHub, but there are other sites.
Then, start following the instructions on the bot and post questions as you have them.
Nobody is going to be able to give you a walkthrough in a post. There are a lot of concepts at play which are all going to require you get on google and start learning. You’ll inevitably run into issues that can be specifically asked about and answered but this is so general how would we even begin to give a walkthrough.
If I had to give a spot to start I’d say look into interacting with the apis (or any apis in general) first in your desired language and then figure out some things you can do with the data you’re getting back from the calls.
Righty. Thanks
What do you want it to do?
There's a lot of automation program that works rather easily. But it's more about the program you choose.
I’m familiar with knowledge graphs, SPARQL, a tiny tiny tiny bit of SQL, python and R (mostly because of school).
Sounds like you have some computer knowledge. So next thing you should do is look up what ever you want to do and then see if there's some automation already at play.
If you want something for lemmy, start looking through these and good luck.
The part that s throwing me off is
Without technical know-how
Because if you want a bot to tackle a very specific problem, you'll most likely have to dig through documentation to understand how. But that's about as technical as it gets as well. And the knowledge listed is about the foundation everyone else has that is building small scale bots for narrow use cases from what I know.
Yeah, most people don't realize programming is just reading websites/documents and trying to figure out how to fit piece A to piece B.
I mean there's some programs where there's no real APIs, but for the most part it's mostly "Get X to do Y" I do networking code for a router and a decent chunk of what I REALLY do in code is configuring stuff based on how our device is configured... or configuring stuff that configures stuff.
Thank you for the link. It’s helped me grasp some things I found vague in my understanding.
As a follow up, you might want to start with a discord bot if you're curious. We have a slack bot at work that's pretty useful. But again it depends what your goal is or what you want to do. Programming is fun and working with simple bots is probably the easiest and most interesting stuff to do... until it doesn't work.
Oh and use ChatGPT to ask questions, I've found it extremely helpful even when I'm doing really hard programming tasks, especially because how you phrase the question helps your brain start working on the problem.