AIED - data parsing

I recently was pulled into troubleshoot and electronic ordering issue. The client was able to send their order electronically, but upon attempting the confirmation stage they were getting an error message indicating the file was a 'partial file'. The particular vendor in this case uses a system of 22 versus 30 characters parsing of raw txt files for interpretation. Years ago, a staff person from this vendor provided me a batch file that would parse out the file and save it as a new file name. It was easy and quick and saved time and brain cells for more important things.

However, over the years that batch file is no longer functioning due to inevitable changes in the Windows operating system. While I could spend time on updating that tool to make it functioning again, it's not real high on the to-do list. Instead, I was able to issue a very simple command to Google Gemini indicating that the attached file needed to be parsed at 22 character intervals and requested the output as a new txt file. Within 30 seconds I had the needed human readable file and was able to identify the likely cause of the 'partial file' warning. Looking at the now parsed file it was easy to spot a record midway that started a gradual +1 character shift on each record line. By the bottom of the file the shifting was disrupting the program's normal interpretation to an unreadable state. In years past (yes that parsing tool has been broken for years), I would manually parse line by line to find the problem area. Bleh!

AI is helping me solve those kinds of time eating jobs that often get pushed to the back burner. Projects that may only take 15-30 minutes to do some sort of manual data manipulation, but not worth the possible 1-3 hours it would take to fix the underlying issue in the first place. With the ease of entering a short command and attaching a file I'm able to get the client their solution that much faster.