Estimated reading time at 200 wpm: 3 minutes
Do you need to know exactly how the electronics in your car works – or how the transmission works – before you drive your car? Hover your mouse over these these 3 dots just in case. That’s the point. It is about how I did that 3 dots thing. I don’t know – I did not code it. I used tools. I don’t know how exactly the tools work. The tools are called AI!
Whether or not you agree our Fat Disclaimer applies
I use AI – and I don’t trust AI. But AI can do some amazing safe things. The 3 dots thing was spotted as a feature on someone’s website. I had to figure out how to do it.
The Ask
So I went to DeepSeek first. DS produced something called snippets for another thing called WPCode which is a plugin in the background. It uses ‘code’. AI generated code. DS created 3 snippets to work together. I’m clueless as to what the code does. It involves things like php, CSS and Javascript. The snippets worked. But I wasn’t quite satisfied.
Taking it to the master
So I went to Claude.ai – the master of coding. Claude looked at the 3 snippets from DS and found a way to fuse them into one snippet that would work in WPCode. All I know is that WPCode is powerful and does some amazing things with code.
A few tweaks later and it’s good. It worked.
Now a thing called a shortcode is what WPCode would identify as something to act on. I did not want to be manually typing [fn]Some text [/fn] manually each time.
So then comes the Espanso move: to create a trigger that would spit out a variation of those shortcode tags. Claude took care of the code for Espanso. It was 3 lines of code and maybe 50 characters.
Solution
The one code snippet in WPCode did the whole job.
Espanso allowed me to type :fn and then the following would fly automatically onto what I’m typing.
[[fn]]insert text[[/fn]]
Then I can insert text for what I want to popup on hovering 3 dots.
Conclusion
I don’t know – nor do I need to know how it all works.
Most people don’t know how the following actually work: mobile phones, aircraft, washing machines, cars, radios, fruit machines, diagnostic equipment – and so on. But every day, loads of items are used without need to understand how they work.
If I can, you cannot! Oh yes – it’s true!
