Build a bulk file renamer transcript

Hi, my name is Satish Vijay. I'm a Google Developer expert and I write software. One of the things that I come across very regularly when working with systems is small tasks that give me high anxiety, even though the task itself is not severe. One of those is renaming files. It seems like a simple task, but it's a high anxiety task. Why because in the process of renaming, there's a chance that you overwrite files and delete data.

You could risk a regex heavy command and accidentally wipe out your data, or you could spend hours doing it by hand. Both are torturous. Both are time wasting. So I want to be able to automate that away as quickly as possible. Let's build a tool that gives you CLI velocity with GUI level peace of mind. So here's an example that I have. I have multiple files already that I've created, and I want to be able to rename these.

Now, one way to do it would be to just go in and do this manually one by one. But imagine going through each of these files one by one and renaming them when there are hundreds of files. Clearly that is not a good way to do this. The other way to do this would be to maybe run a command, say if you use run a command like this to rename multiple files. This is a command line that allows you to change multiple files in that script.

However, the problem with this is you don't know what is going to happen at the end. Unix and Linux sometimes is unforgiving, and the commitment that you have or you make to rename these files is once and done. If you overwrite the files, it's gone. So how do we make this faster. What I would like is some visual feedback that gives me some information, whether the files are OK to be renamed or not. So first, let's go to Gemini app and see what is the kind of UI that I would like to build for this.

So I've already given a prompt here and I've said the typical UI for this. The graphical user interface for this would have an input file pattern, a replace pattern, and it gives me some feedback when there's a potential conflict of overwriting. So I take this idea and now I want a user interface for it to translate our vision of what we wanted in the UI into working code. I come to stitch, and I give it a prompt to give me something that matches that user interface.

I already have a prompt in place where I'm asking you to lay out these different components that I want, the input pattern, the replace pattern, and seeing the list of files. So with that in place, let me just run it. I run stitch, which now goes to the process of finding a user interface for me. It comes up with colors. It comes up with a design and let's wait a bit for it to give us an output. So stitch is currently going through the process of designing the user interface for us with the requirements that we gave it in the prompt, the kind of fields that we wanted, the kind of files, the way it should be shown, all of that.

And with that initial view ready, I'm fairly confident we can build the rest of the app. So right now we have a working UI in the way that I wanted it. And this is just a visual interface. What we need to do next is to export it into code. So we select that entity export to zip. And at this point it exports the code into HTML and some design files. The next step would be to go into the command line and extract that. So we move the stitch files that we had.

And then we extract that. And we can see that right now there is a HTML which has the visual, the UI of what we wanted to create. OK, so with this basic code in place, the next step for us would be to go to anti-gravity and ask it to build a full fledged application for us. So in the application, what we want is to have the HTML file that was created embedded. And wherever we run this application, it should show the files from that folder, which allows us to then rename it.

And I've chosen Golang for this because it's fast. It also allows me to distribute it as an application, as in a single executable, and is a great programming language. So with that, with an anti-gravity, I give it some of the instructions and as you can see, short instructions to create the entire app. I have a skill file for Golang, which is a latest and greatest way in which to build Golang code. So I'm allowing anti-gravity to access that file.

So it asks me whether it can run other tools go version. I'm fairly confident that there's a safe command, and I'm going to allow anti-gravity to run it for the entirety of this session. So it has, in that brief couple of minutes, create an entire application that allows you to rename files in a way that gives you complete confidence. So in this folder here we've got multiple files like data, file 1, file two, all of that.

And what I want to be able to do is to rename some of them. So for example, when I search for file, it lists all the files that has the text file in it at the very top. And then if I want to replace that say into something like file, it gives me that information right here. And it allows me to apply those changes. What if we had the same name for the output. So if we had something like file and then we allowed the numbers 0 to 9.

And then the file name. And then we said we want all of them to be changed to data file. Now there is a conflict as you can see over here changing files. One file two file three to data file means that it will get overwritten. And that is a conflict. And then the UI automatically does not allow me to apply these changes. So what the entire utility now does is to be able to help me have confidence in these file changes or the file name changes, and it's easy to fix it.

Now that I know that there is a conflict, I can go in and say, OK, what. I don't want you to rename all of them like that. Let's use a little regular expressions to change it to something that does not conflict. So with that simple change, now I know that my files file 1, file two, file three will get renamed correctly without having any kind of conflict or overwriting. And with that change, then I have made those files file name changes.

And if I come back into the command line, I can see that the files have now gone from file 1, file to file three to data files. So all these changes have happened. In a way that has no conflict and nothing over it. The application itself has understood many ideas. So anti-gravity has understood things like not allowing conflict, even allowing me to include subfolders. So in the earlier one I was only changing files in the current folder, whereas now it can allow me to change with a simple checkbox, even files that are within subfolders.

So it's a fairly complex app that takes care of many use cases, many variations, and all of that has been understood both by stitch in creating the user interface and also by anti-gravity in creating the code and all. It took me to do this with just two prompts, and with that a very complex task that was unnerving. That was high anxiety has been reduced to something simple, easy, clean. I did spend a week building this.

I spent a few minutes using prompts. I just turned a manual, high risk chore into an automated bulletproof process that isn't just code, that's reclaimed time and peace of mind. Make personal productivity tools that work instantly for you. Stop doing the Taleo. Build your way out of it.