I created — well, maybe I should rephrase that to: I was co-creator? a co-inspirator? — a Chrome Browser Extension for uploading local files to an Oracle Cloud Storage Bucket.
In order to produce that extension — in 25 minutes give or take — I fed about 15 sentences (not all of them compete, certainly not correctly spelled) into the Cascade agent in Windsurf IDE. Here they are:
In addition to feeding these words, I also had to press buttons to allow Cascade to run terminal commands and to keep the changes it had made.
This is what the project looks like — all created by Cascade, except for the three icon files:
This is what the end result looks like — a browser extension running in a side panel in the Chrome (or Edge or Brave) browser:
After the upload is complete, these three files are available through the OCI Object Storage page in the console:
Supported by an Options page opened from the Extension Details page to set the PAR Url that links to the Storage Bucket on Oracle Cloud:
The particular functionality of the extension is not what I want to draw your attention to. Nor its implementation.
The fact that through a simple dialog — helped a bit by my earlier knowledge of extensions that allowed me to provide slightly better instructions and to evaluate the artefacts produced by Cascade — could cocreate such an extension in so short a time frame and with so little effort is pretty wild. Writing this article takes much more time and effort. (there must a an app for that …)
Let me give you a little insight in how Cascade’s end of the conversation — this pair programming session — looks:
The first two interactions resulted already in a functional extension:
I wanted the PAR to be an option in the extension configuration, not a filed in the main UI for the extension.
I prefer to have the style definitions in separate CSS files rather than in the HTML files:
Not a problem of course for Cascade.
Then I wanted to publish the extension on GitHub
And the repo is live at https://github.com/lucasjellema/quick-oci-object-manager-browser-extension.
And has a very instructive readme.md as well:
Wrapping up
I had fun using Cascade to create this extension. I had created extensions before and I also built code in the past to upload files to OCI. I could therefore assess and appreciate the work done by Cascade. The deliverables are quite good and what is perhaps even the best part is the natural interaction I had with Cascade. Similar to a (patient, knowledgeable and quick) coworker who I could instruct.
I have not yet tried instruction cascade just by speaking (instead of typing) — I am not sure that can be done at this point. Nor have I tried providing instructions through sketches or images, something that apparently can be done.
