Yesterday, I had found a method for CoPilot to see an entire database.

In order to do this, all the objects of the database need to be exported to text files. This is an undocumented and unsupported feature of Access, but it has been there for a long time and is what allows Access Add-Ins like Ivercy, OASIS-SVN, and the msaccess-vcs-integration project on GitHub to work.

I already am using versioning, so I just needed to get CoPilot (or ChatGPT, or whatever) the text of those exported documents. By working with CoPilot I was able to create a quick PowerShell script to copy all my file data of my source files into one file using a header for each section as the filename. This way CoPilot could tell what each file was named and what it’s content was.

It worked pretty well. A couple of things I’m thinking about doing in no particular order:

• It would be nice to have a script that could create a file like this with the press of a button. Perhaps instead of the file names I’m using which are not exactly the object name, I could use the object name itself. This would allow more of a one to one referencing of what I’m looking at in my database.
• I’m going to look into my OpenAI API account and see if I can utilize the sdOpenAI plugin along with the OpenAI account to automatically load a text file (containing the exported database object) so my plugin will be able to take advantage of OpenAI knowing everything about my database already. This might not be possible with this version of the API, but there are Agents that allow you to load files as data sources for the Agents to be aware of. I would need a different plugin to try that…
• Since I am using Access Jumpstart as my Access framework, I could also make a copy of my AJS library so the AI agent could load that as well and have a full view of my structure at least.
• In this context, I wonder if it having access to the data would be advantageous, Maybe I could automate partial data uploads as well.
• I’m particularly interested in using AI to pair or mob program with. Perhaps I could have both CoPilot and OpenAI working with me at the same time and we could all bounce ideas off of each other.
• I’m also interested in TDD and I’m thinking AI could help me both create tests and make my code more testable and even create other objects for me to simulate a form or table. I know that there is already some code out there to create form and table classes. This could potentially create cross table classes to represent domain level objects to interact with in a testable format.

If you can’t tell, I’m very happy and excited about this prospect. This would definitely be a vector by which someone could attempt to create some kind of CoPilot for Access type add-in.