As the other commenter said, prompting is everything, and most LLMs are sycophants and will try to do anything you tell them without pausing to tell you "why the hell are you trying to query an API with SQL? That's not what SQL is for". While it's possible to build stuff with llms with little to no technical knowledge, it's still very hit and miss.

With that said, the space is moving incredibly fast and the latest Claude/GPT-o1 are far ahead of anything that was available 3-6 months ago. Unfortunately Claude doesn't allow sharing publicly like ChatGPT, but here is a gist of Claude's answer for +- the same question your friend asked:

https://gist.github.com/ldorigo/1a243218e00d75dd2baaf0634640...

I'm on mobile so it wasn't handy to quickly paste an example API request/documentation for the LLM to follow; so there's a chance it might have hallucinated some if the API parameters - but if I included that; in my experience the code would work on first shot 90% of the time.

Regarding your second query, I'm too unfamiliar with clojure and the two solutions you mentioned to really understand what you were trying to achieve, but if you explain just a little bit more, I'm happy to record a screencast of me figuring it out with llms/genai tools from the ground up. What do you mean with "a container solution that allows for live coding"?