Comment by qnr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qnr | Hacker News Reader

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I have been developing a hobby project (AI powered document search) for a few months and was in sore need of a frontend. My frontend development skills however are stuck in late 1990s and I have zero skill with anything but plain HTML and a little bit of JS. Several times I tried learning React, reading tutorials, watching videos, but the whole idea of it was very removed from how I learned to code, so I gave up every time.

Today, I asked ChatGPT to develop the React app for me. ChatGPT guided me through the entire process starting from installing npm and necessary dependencies. The commands it suggested sometimes didn't work but every time I just copy-pasted the resulting error message into ChatGPT and it offered a working solution. I gave it the example of JSON output from my API backend and it generated the search UI which, to my surprise, worked.

My wet dream for the past few months was to implement infinite scrolling for my search. Again, after hours of google searches, tutorials, etc. I just gave up every single time. Not today. I asked ChatGPT to add infinite scrolling to my app. It wasn't easy. It didn't produce a working app immediately, it took a couple hours of conversations: I had many questions how different parts of React worked, how to fix errors etc. etc. In the end however, I had my working search app, and with infinite scroll to boot!

I haven't done a single google search or consulted any external documentation to do it and I was able to progress faster than I have ever did before when learning a new thing. ChatGPT is, for all intents and purposes, magic.

It doesn't sound that much different than going through Google and Stackoverflow though, is it? In a few hours of googling you can probably get something working if you are an experienced dev.

The crucial difference is that at no point I felt I was stuck. I could paste any line of code into ChatGPT and ask it to explain it. Practically every time I got a meaningful and valuable explanation, moreover the explanation was in the context of my code. Similarly all functions it generated were matching the context of my code so I could just copy and paste it and it just worked, most of the time.

Rather than going through Google and Stackoverflow it felt like working side-by-side with a moderately competent developer. Mind you, I have tried the google-and-stackoverflow method before for the exact same thing, and failed every time ;-)

It's very different because it will answer the question you asked, rather than answering a question that matches a substring of the question you asked like Google will.

Google apparently uses BERT to actually answer the question you asked … and an obvious incarnation for this sort of tech is probably going to be further integration into google . Makes sense doesn’t it .

BERT is a simple model that is not capable of answering questions in this manner. For very simple things it might help with that answer box at the top, but that's not what I meant.

Yeah I had a slightly similar experience as OP, though simpler. I asked it to automate a basic task, something I hadn't done before. I managed to do it with ChatGPT only, no other resources.

That said - ChatGPT did make mistakes, there were inconsistencies in its instructions, it didn't recognize certain bugs (I had to find them myself). _But_ there was something about the chat-based interaction that to an extent helped me preserve flow (maybe a bit like pair programming?).

I do think that if I had set my mind to it, I would have been faster solving the task with Google, and to some extent I went through this exercise just to test ChatGPT.

ChatGPT helped me close several business deals. I am now a mega millionaire thanks to ChatGPT! Before, I wasn’t able to find the basic info on how to close multi million dollar deals, and I tried all kinds of stuff. But ChatGPT helped me through that. On the calls - whenever I didn’t know what to say next, I would just read off what ChatGPT was responding to the customers, and to my surprise, it matched what they wanted to hear! And they started responding back and forth with it as if it was always in the plan! In the end, they didn’t exactly say “shut up and take my money”, but they did seem to express deep concern that I wouldn’t have availability for them, and essentially agreed to all the upsells very quickly.

I recommend ChatGPT to anyone who wants to close customers or save their marriage. Just say whatever ChatGPT is telling you… even if that means using one of the new “personal” beamed sound into your skull things. You’ll have superhuman ability to vibe with anyone and outcompete everyone who relies on just “their own experience”.

- Written by ChatGPT in response to a prompt.

In the end it added, “no one will ever believe you” in all lowercase.

Presumably it does a better job than "closed as duplicate" or "you actually want XYZ even though you asked for ABC".

"this question is not a good fit..."

Hopefully ChatGPT doesn't refuse to answer my question because of some reason appreciated only by people who get too much pleasure from the StackOverflow moderation game

I’ve been thinking about exactly this.

That “it’s just a different search front end”… but I think after more experience with it I disagree.

At its worst, it’s “multiple searches” at once.

Example1… I wanted to find a CAGE for code a specific military mfg. I only had the last 3 digits. I asked for CAGE codes that match and got all the answers instantly. I could have searched this, but it would have been multiple searches.

I asked for the etymology for the Swahili word for trapezoid… again, multiple searches. If I could have found links to the Arabic root of some Swahili words at all.

That’s it’s worst case, convenient multiple searches. The better case is the UX of a conversation is powerful for the user, in a way we are just learning the words for.

>if you are an experienced dev

But OP explicitly said they had little experience in this area. They also presumably have a technical career and are awash in the ways of Google. I'm in a similar situation to GP and have gone down that very path with React and whatnot. It's like you're starting a rodeo off the bull and have to figure out how to get back on. It's a terrible experience and you're left infuriated at a faceless collective that carelessly makes getting started so difficult.

An experienced dev can work something out even if its not his main stack. I could probably get something very basic done in Swift or Android despite never doing it. Experienced devs are just good in reading documentation and having a general understanding of how things should work.

Totally, and it seems like ChatGPT almost does the experienced dev work here for a junior developer - impressive.

But much like you need to cause some stress to a muscle to cause it to grow, junior developers historically needed to get experienced at finding some of the solutions to their own pain to become really experienced developers...

It seems like ChatGPT may cut that form of growth out of the cycle...

I wonder about the implications of this... Junior devs will progress more quickly, but they will also grow less of their own skills and be very reliant on ChatGPT - like an exoskeleton for their development skills.

I guess that will be great for OpenAI if they can charge a hefty monthly fee...

I'd still rather max out my own skills before relying on an exoskeleton (once I've maxed myself out sure, give me the exoskeleton, and let's see what it can do), but maybe I'm too old fashioned...

replace chat GPT with slide rule and calculator and you have the endless arguments made against calculators in the 70s. change it to typewriters in word processors and you have all the hand ringing in the early '80s about how writing was going to be destroyed by easy copy paste. That isn't a proof that your argument is wrong of course, but it is very suggestive to me.

I typed this with text to speech, another thing we were confidently told would never work

I hear you. Developers these days. They wear the crutches and exoskeletons of interpreted languages. Real senior devs. only write in assembly. /s

Why is one abstraction more "true", "less creative" or more "strong muscle" than another?

One big difference is there is no ads or seo, no one is trying to get in the way of you trying to learn something. Hopefully that will never happen.

It's simply not magic.

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