In this video, we'll build three tkinter apps using pieces and AI. Hey guys, John Aler here from codingme.com, and in this video, I want to show you this super useful free tool that I recently discovered called pieces. And this thing is going to massively supercharge your coding workflow. In this video, we'll use it to build three tkinter apps. First, a simple calculator app, then a basic CRM app (customer relationship management) with full database support, and finally, a fun blackjack game. I think you're going to be amazed just how quickly and easily we can build out these apps using pieces. Special thanks to the guys at pieces for sponsoring this video. Not only is this just about the most useful coding tool I've ever seen, but everyone I've talked to over at pieces has been super cool, so definitely go check it out. So, very quickly before we get into it, the pieces app is basically a workflow tool powered by AI, built by coders for coders, and it'll supercharge your coding workflow in ways you probably never imagined.

first, it has a really great snippet tool that lets you save code snippets locally and to the cloud, and search those snippets using natural language. If you're anything like me, you'll very quickly wonder how you lived without it. It also has AI-powered chats using whatever LLM you prefer, from Chat GPT-4 and all the other models over at OpenAI, all the way to local LLMs that run on your own computer, like Mistral, LLaMA, and others. And maybe most importantly, it has a really cool live context tool that keeps track of your workflow across your entire computer and uses machine learning that you can interface with and ask questions. So like, Hey, that PAME documentation I looked up last week, can you summarize that for me? and it will. Or like, Hey, that G chat I had with Bob last week about that new feature he wants added, what was that all about again? It'll summarize it for you. It's crazy. It's almost magic. It's free, and I keep finding more and more uses for it every

single day, and we're going to dive into it today, so let's head over to our code. Okay, before we get started, head over to pieces.app, download and install your own version of this totally free. It's available for Windows, Linux, and Mac, and it's pretty straightforward to install this thing. Once you have it set up, go ahead and open it, and I'm just going to jump right in here. So, what you want to do is first head over to co-pilot chat. Now, the first time you install it, you have to go through a little onboarding thing. It takes about 30 seconds, and you tell it your preferences, the things you like to code in, the languages you use. Be as specific as possible because it uses that to tailor everything to you going forward. So, I've already done that, and we want to go over to co-pilot chat and come down here and hit this live context on. This is super important. You want this on, and in fact, come over here to the bottom and click on settings and go to machine learning and make sure

workstream pattern engine is on, and basically what this is, is it's AI that follows you around on your computer. Whatever you do on your computer, whatever web pages you look at, whatever code you're working on, anything you're doing on your computer, it kind of, I don't know if records is the right word, and saves that onto your computer. Machine learning goes through that, and it can figure out what you're doing and help you with it if you need help. So, if we get an error in our terminal, it will see that error. We don't even have to type the error in, and we can say, Hey, that error I just got, what was that? And it'll tell you. So, make sure this is turned on. I know for privacy this may scare the heck out of you, but it saves it to your computer locally, and nobody has access to all this information but your Pieces app on your computer. And you can always pause this, come over here, pause it for a few minutes, or turn it off if you're worried.

about passwords and things like that that it will see. You can go ahead and pause that, so make sure this is turned on. Head back over here and make sure live context is on. And what we want to do is just start a new chat. So we've already got one here. I'm going to come down here and let's just say create a calculator app in tkinter. Very basic, very simple, and boom, it's knocking this out. And you can notice right off the bat we're using class-based programming. Maybe you like that, maybe you don't. We'll play with that in just a second, but here we go. And I didn't start counting, but we're at like what, 5 seconds now, 6 seconds, 7, 8, less than 10 seconds, got to be right. And boom, you've got all of this code ready to go. Now the pieces app comes with extensions for like Visual Studio Code and a lot of other IDEs that you may use. I like to use Sublime Text and I don't think there's one for that, so we're just

going to use Sublime Text and copy and paste, but if you're using something like Visual Studio Code, you can use the extension for that. It segues right into it. So, all right, I go ahead and copy this, and I've got Sublime Text open, and I'm just going to paste in this code, and I'm going to save this as pieces dcal dopy. So, go and save this, head over to our terminal. I'm not even going to look at this code yet; we will in a second, but I'm in my ct.com directory. I got my virtual environment turned on as usual, and let's just run this python pieces. cal. py. We do. We have a calculator. So, let's go 7 * 2 = 14. It seems to work. Divided by 2 = 7.0. Definitely seems to work. We can close things. Wow, just that easy. So, this is a little bit bigger. We might want to change the size of this, but hey, this is pretty cool. Now, what else can we do here?

I'm not thrilled about these buttons. I want to kind of expand them, so let's just head back over here, go ahead and close this, go back to our pieces app, and let's come down here and let's say, uh, expand the buttons to the width of the app. I don't know, see what we got here, and it is knocking out this code just that fast and easy, right? This isn't a super complicated app, but it would still take 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, maybe an hour to write all this out just by hand, right? So this is a great starting point, and I don't recommend necessarily that you just have it write code like this. We're just doing this for fun to see what the capabilities of this thing are, but what I would do, okay, so it's expanded a little bit, it looks a little bit nicer, and uh, but like I said, what I would do is use it as a starting-off point, right? So you get your code base here, then you can come in yourself and Tinker it to

make it whatever you want to do so uh very very cool. Now let's say we want to make this look different. Let's come back over here and let's say refactor using custom tkinter, which as you probably know is a library that makes it look more modern. So here we go, it's imported custom tkinter as ctk, and it is just knocking this right out. I can spot check this here, and I see okay, there's some mention of ctk button. That looks good. ctk button again, very cool. Let's come up here, copy this, head back over here, and just paste this in. Save it, run it, and boom, we get an error. Now it says no module named custom tkinter. Now I know that that means we don't have custom tkinter installed right now. You could copy this if you don't have context engine turned on, but we could just come down here and just say, I got an error in my terminal. Can you explain it and tell me how to fix it? Right here, it's saying we

need to be more specific, but then it says pip install custom tenter. So, I've noticed with the live context, which I think is still in beta, if we come back here, um, maybe not. It was recently in beta. It takes a minute or two to sort of catch up with what you're doing now. Once you have this on and running, it gets better and faster at doing things. But right here, we just very quickly did something. It may or may not have had time to sort of do the machine learning on it and see what it was all about. Like I said, it gets faster at that as you use this, as it's open longer, right? So, it kind of learns as it goes along, and it gets better at that. So, this is an absolutely brand new installation. So, right off the bat, it may or may not tell you EX exactly what you expect to see in your terminal outside of pieces, but it looks like it did right here. So, it's telling us to pip install custom deer, which we already knew that, but it's nice.

to have if we didn't know that if you got just some random error you didn't know what it was. Hey, that just solved it, right? I mean, instantly. So let's go pip install custom tkinter. Bang Zoom. Let's run the sky again. Hey, look at that. That is amazing. Looks much better, much more modern. 9 * 3 is 27. Uh, let's see what else can we do just very quickly. Uh, refactor using dark mode. I like dark mode in custom tkinter. And there we go back over here. Copy this, paste it in, save it, run it. And now we have dark mode. Very, very cool. So let's try this one more time. Let's, uh, refactor using ttk bootstrap. Another librarian tkinter that makes it look more modern. And I already know I haven't installed that. So while we're doing that, I'm going to pip install ttk bootstrap just so we don't get an error. But I suspect we may get another type of error. Let's see. All right, it is knocking that right out. Okay.

So there we go. We copy this head back over here, paste it, save it, run it, and in fact, no, we did not get an error. Very cool. Now again, this is a little bit too big. We could tell it, Hey, make it smaller, or we could just resize it ourselves a little bit, and that's a little bit off, but very, very cool. And this looks great, right? A fully functioning calculator. 9 divided by 3, 3.0. Very cool. So okay, that's our example number one. What did that take? A minute to make and another minute to refactor it three different times. We got an error. He has solved their error for us. This is amazing, right? This is massively going to speed up your workflow. Even if you're not relying on it completely to write your code, just getting a base of something to start with that you can then tinker with is just massive. So all right, let's go ahead and close this. Let's do another one. Let's head back over here. I'm going to start a new chat.

and again make sure this is on. There's probably a way to set this to turn on by default if you go into the settings. I just haven't messed with it yet. So what do we want to do now? Let's create a T ker app that asks for a person's name and email address and then saves that to a SQL light 3 database. It should have a feature to look up records and display them when clicked on. So a little bit more complicated of an app, an actual CRM app, customer relation management. Put your name in, put your email in, save it to a database. We'll have a database going, you know, let's see how good it does right off the bat. And here, this is functional programming, it's not class-based. We can see I like that better anyway. So let's go ahead and save this or copy it at least, head over here to our Sublime Text, and I've got another app I'm calling it pieces dcmp. So let's go ahead and paste it and save it. And let's come back over here.

and run python pieces crmpi, and we get this little app here. So let's type in John Elder, and let's say John codemy.com. Let's add a record. Record added successfully. Now this is very tiny. We might want to make it bigger. We probably would. Let's type in April Elder, and she's at april.cod.com, just making that up, whatever. Add another record. Okay, now let's look up record. And when I click this, another box pops up over here, and we have John Elder and April Elder with their IDs, and they're listed. We can't click on them, but that's okay. Let's come back here, and let's try name. Well, actually, let's go back to the pieces app and let's try to add some more functionality to this because that works. That's exactly what we want. But let's say add a feature to search records by name, right? So that sort of listed them when we click the button, but I want to be able to look up a specific

record. Let's see if we can do that now. Those were saved to the database, so even though we closed that app, it should have saved those to a database that's on our computer now. And when we run this program again, we should be able to pick up where we left off and search for records that we've already added. So let's copy this, head back over here, and let's paste it. Let's go ahead and save this, bring it over here, and if we click this to look up records, sure enough, we've got all of our old records. But let's search records by name. I click this button, another box pops up, so enter name. I'm going to type in John, and when I search, boom, we get John Elder. Let's search for lowercase John. That worked too. Let's search for lowercase April. That worked too. It just worked. Works. Let's type John Elder. That worked. Let's type in Elder. Now we get two John and April Elder. I'm kind of speechless. That just worked right out of the box. Uh, let's

type in Elders nothing so okay. Let's look and see what our code has here. So here it is. Here's where we're creating the table if it doesn't exist. Here's where we're adding records. That looks good. Here's where we're looking up records. And then here's where we're searching records. And let's look into this. So here we're performing a search. That looks good. It's using like. And this seems to work. Now I have a certain way that I like to search for things that uses Wild Card characters. So let's say I have such a thing and I want to kind of save that as a snippet. So first let's search for this. Now I will mention also you're going to want to install the extension for your browser. We'll show you that in just a second. So let's search for uh I don't know. Let's try SQL light 3 python uh select from where I don't know column contains string wild card. I don't know. We search this uh here we have whatever this first

thing is, and let's come through here my string that looks good. There we go, I like this. So if I hover over this, you can see you can copy and save it to Pieces. This one I think is a little too small, so I'm not getting that pop-up. This one I am. So what you can do is, if this happens and it pops up, you can just copy and save. If it's too small for that pop-up like we're seeing right here, we can just highlight all of this and right-click and Pieces save selection. So I'll click that. Now if we head back over to Pieces and come up here to our saved material, this is sort of the snippet library I like to call it, and this will list all of your snippets. Now if you're a developer and you're anything like me, you have thousands of code snippets scattered all over the place. You have bookmarks to GitHub things. Oh, oh, it's giving us some help there. You have bookmarks to GitHub code. You have, you know, I have my own

little website where I just save snippets where I can kind of look at it when I need to, but it's not great because there's no search functionality for that. I have snippets saved on this computer, on another computer, on a laptop. I have them just everywhere. This is a central place where all of your snippets will go forever more, and you can search them using natural language, and it works amazingly well. And right here, we see there it is, and we can, if we want to, kind of edit this. We could come up here and click edit, and here it is right here. So if I wanted, for instance, to put a little comment, let's say wildcard lookup in SQLite 3, something like that, save and exit. Now there's that comment there, and again, we've only got one here, but from now on, as I'm saving snippets, though, these will add up, and you can have hundreds, thousands, whatever. What's nice is this will save to your computer. It will also save to the cloud. If you head over, let's say, let's go back to

our co-pilot. Click on the settings, and you can go to personal cloud, and you can set up your own little personal cloud on pieces, and you can set up a little username, and you can share those snippets. You see right now I'm disconnected because I don't have this set up yet, but once you set it up, it will save your snippets up into the cloud, and then you can access them from any computer. You can share them with team members or anybody else. If you were an instructor like me, this is great. I could share my code and my code snippets with students, so tons of different reasons to use this, and this may be my favorite feature of this entire thing. Having all these snippets that you can search with natural language, have them backed up to the cloud, oh just huge time saver. I love this a lot. So uh let's head back over here to our saved material. Let's grab this guy. Let's just kind of copy this here. I'm going to copy this. Let's head back over here. Well, in fact

let's just do this in a code. I'm just going to paste this in. So instead of cursor execute, this is obviously going to be c.execute. And let me just comment out the one that pieces did for us. And let's just do it with this one. Before we run this, let's look at this just to make sure. From users, nope, we called it people here. So users should be people. And or this is variable, nope, this should be search name because that's our original code is. And what else? Search name where, oh, name column. Okay, from people, we name like search name. Okay, that should work. So let's give this a try. Head back over here. Let's run this guy. We've got our thing here. We can search by records. Come back over here. Type in Elders, get nothing. Type in Elder, we get John Elder. But our Tuple is out of range. We're getting all kinds of Errors. So in this particular instance, and I suspected that would be the case, the old way was better. I'm

going to take that out and put this back. Now, if we save this and run it again, we can search by record again. We can search record by name, Elder Boom. We get our two records. Very, very cool. So again, I don't really know what this is. I just wanted to show you that you can save snippets and then have them searchable in the Pieces app forever more, which is super, super useful and very cool. So okay, we've got now two pretty intricate programs that we've created very quickly. Let's create a new chat, do something a little bit more fun. Let's turn our context on. Let's create a Tkinter app that plays Blackjack. Blackjack. I misspelled Blackjack. And again, we've got class-based programming. That's fine. Maybe like functional programming. If it gives you class-based programming, you could just say refactor using functional programming instead of class-based programming. It will rewrite the app. Maybe we'll do that. I don't know. This video is getting a little bit long. Now while it's doing this, I should mention.

Right here, I've selected chat GPT OpenAI with GPT 4.0. You can select which model you want to use, or you can use something on-device, and you can download whatever large language model you like. Mistol, we've got Microsoft, got Llama 2, Tiny Llama, and these will run on your computer. So, it takes a lot longer to run when it's on your computer, and you need a good GPU in order to speed that up. Obviously, if you're using ChatGBT and 4.0, or 40, I should say, it goes instantly. So, you can change all of those in settings to whatever you want. Very, very cool. So, okay, looks like we're done here. Let's come back here and copy this, head back over to Sublime Text. I've got another file called pieces D blackjack 21. Really curious to see what it comes up with this time. So, let's go pieces D blackjack. Oh, very small. Let's see. There we go. So, player three and three score. The dealer score is hidden. We've got

six. Let's hit. We've got nine. Hit again. 15. Outstand. Player wins. Okay. It didn't show us what the final score was, so I don't love that. We might have to fix that. So let's hit here. 16. 24. Player bus. Dealer win. So okay. We've got the basics of a blackjack game here, but this leaves a lot to be desired. So let's come back over here to our PC's app and let's say refactor, or not even refactor, let's just say show the Dealer's hand at the end of the game. I don't know, like that. And I created blackjack games on this channel before, and it took several videos for us to get through them. Bang. Zoom. This does it instantly. It's just amazing. So okay. Let's go ahead and save this. Run it. Okay. So we've got 12. Let's hit. We got 19. Let's stand. And now it shows the score of 22. And it says player wins. So player 397. What else do we want? Let's say uh keep a running total of wins and

losses and show the player suits. Is that a thing, the card suit? So if it was like a club or a spade or a heart or whatever. Oh wow, we're getting little emojis, huh? That's interesting. Didn't expect that. I expected it to say club or something like the word club and not show a club emoji. But that's very cool. Okay, so that looks good. Let's copy this and head back over here, paste it in, run this guy. Now it's showing the little emojis. So we want to hit 15, hit again. Oh, we got a stand at 17. Oh, it's tie, so wins, losses don't change. Uh, 19, let's stand. Hey, we won. It updated. We've won one, lost zero. Okay, so hit or stand at 20. We got to stand at 20. And look at that, we've won two, lost zero. Very, very cool. Now, of course, this is, you know, this is great functionality, but it doesn't look great. So again, this is a great starting point to writing your code. You could then

tweak it yourself using images or, you know, pictures of cards, whatever you wanted, or you can even, you know, tell co-pilot, Hey, I have these images saved to this directory. Use them. And it will do that. So, very, very cool. Um, what else can we... Let's just try one very quick. I don't know if this is going to work. Let's say, uh, Create ASCII art to depict the cards in the game. I have no idea if this is going to work. This is why you should try things before you just... Whoa, look at that. Oh, that's interesting. How to... Whoa, uh, integrate that into the code. I don't know. Is it doing it? It doesn't look like it's doing it. Integrate. Let's try it again. Integrate the ASCII art into the code. Oh, yeah, there we go. We've got something going there. All right, well, fingers crossed. Let's give this a try. I'm gonna copy, paste, save, run it. I have no idea. Oh, we got some errors. So, let's see if it picked up the error. I

got an error in the terminal. Please explain it and update the code accordingly. Okay, so the context engine didn't quite pick that up just yet. Again, like I said, sometimes it does take a minute, which is not a huge problem. Let's come through here and let's copy this and just paste it in. Oh, it's so much work right there. You're encountering is blah blah blah. Modify the script. Updated script example. All right, let's see. Looks like we're using F strings here, so that's kind of interesting. Okay, so it's done. Let's copy this, paste it in, save it, run it again, and it doesn't look like it's really done it. So let's, oh, 21 stand player wins. So I'm not seeing any ASCII. I, oh, it does it in the terminal. How about that? That's amazing. Look at that. Wow. Okay, um, well, what can we do here? Uh, depict the ASCII art in the Tenter Gooey, not terminal. I don't know if it could do that. Let's see. This is just amazing. So much fun. It says it's using

label widgets so I don't know it. It seems confident that it has done what we asked. Let's copy, paste, save back over here, run this guy again. Oh my, look at that hidden card. So let's see, eight and nine is set. Okay, so showing RS, and this is the dealer down here. He has three and something hidden. So we're at 17, we got a stand. Oh man, it updates that too. The player wins. All right, so we've got 20, we want a stand. Player wins again. Man, it's doing it. That's amazing. Now, this is kind of janky, right? Obviously, you would use pictures or, you know, graphics of some sort. We're definitely out of time in this video, but I think you could see just how powerful, how much fun this piece of app is. I very, very highly recommend this. I'm going to be using this for all sorts of things. There are many more features than the two we really looked at, the Snippets, save materials, and the co-pilot chats as well.

as the workflow live contact stuff, which, as I said, gets better the more you use it, as it learns your process. And it's not just for like when you're working on code. Say you look up some library in your web browser, and it explains that library. You can a week later go, Hey, remember that website I looked at that talked about the pig game library I was looking at? Can you summarize that and tell me what that was all about? And it will do it right here in your chat. This thing is very, very cool, and it's only going to get better over time, I think, as AI in general gets better over time. Give it a try. Like I said, I think before you know it, you'll have integrated this so deeply into your daily workflow, you're going to wonder what you did without it. So check it out, pieces.app. And that's all there is to it. So my name is John Elder from cod.com, and I'll see you in the next video.

Build 3 Tkinter Apps Using Pieces and A.I. In Seconds!

Build 3 Tkinter Apps Using Pieces and A.I. In Seconds!

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