WinUIpad: Fixing Problems with AI ⭐

This past weekend, I described my early experiences using Stardock's Clairvoyance as a frontend to Anthropic Claude Pro to see whether I could use them together as an AI pair programming solution to help me get WinUIpad back on track. I had had mixed success doing this with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, and with Claude. But I went into this experience with high hopes, mostly because Brad had given me a few live demos and what I saw was impressive.

What I found exceeded my expectations, and that opened up a new possibility: In addition to fixing the current, single document version of WinUIpad, I secretly hoped that I could use this set of tools to finally implement what I've called my version of Ahab’s white whale: The multi-document, multi-tab version of WinUIpad that was the original point of this project. With apologies for the vagueness, I can now tell you that it will happen. Indeed, it has already happened.

But first things first.
Code review
If you've ever had to walk into a boss's office and sit through an annual assessment, you understand how terrifying it can be to have someone else judge you and the work you do. Getting a review of code you wrote is pretty much identical. It's not for the overly sensitive.

I've told this story before, but when I started writing books in the early 1990s, I had the horrible experience of my co-author, a professor and a genius, reviewing the code I had written for what became a book about Visual Basic 3.0, and finding it lacking. "Are you sure about this?" he asked once while reading a paper printout of some code. "I was," I replied. Knowing that he had found an error because he was smarter than me and knew far more about programming and this language in particular.

If you want to experience this for yourself in the 21st century, you can ask an AI, pretty much any AI, to review some code you wrote. I've done this at least a few times, perhaps most notably with Cursor back in early 2025 when that was a unique bit of functionality that it provided. And regardless of which AI I've used, I've noted two similarities. It's always useful and AI tends to be perhaps overly complimentary, so this process isn't as painful if you're sensitive to criticism.

Given all this, the first thing I asked Clairvoyance to do—and, yes, this is really Clairvoyance plus Claude Pro, but let's just call it Clairvoyance since it can work with any AI backend—was to provide me with a code review of my WinUIpad project. To do so, I created a new Workspace in Clairvoyance and pointed it at the WinUIpad project folder. Then, I typed the following prompt:
can you examine the source code of this windows app sdk project and tell me about any issues you find
That simple.

Clairvoyance examined the contents of the folder, got acquainted with the structure and contents of its source code files and, within half a minute or so it spit out a detailed report that was separated into three sections: Bugs, Code...