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Comment by keneda7 | Hacker News Reader

I've been waiting for an article like this. As a software developer I completely agree with them.

Often when I mention I use ChatGPT I get strange looks. Its like people automatically assume I am going to ChatGPT and saying "Build me a software that does x". I personally see no value in asking it something like that. Its the simple questions that save me 10-15 minutes of reading through google results. For example I often time ask it to rewrite statements into linq or to compare two ways of doing something. Its not correct 100% of the time but it is correct often enough to save me 10 minutes multiple times a day.

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To be fair, Resharper has been showing developers how to convert code into LINQ for over a decade. Using ChatGPT seems to be way slower than having IDE integration and auto-refactorings available.

I wonder how soon MS will start including ChatGPT into visual studio.

Isn't that kinda already what Copilot is? Very similar product with a different name/label.

I actually paid for resharper for many years. However when I switched over to VS22 I decided to give it a shot without it. As its definitely still lacking compared to resharper I have been using ChatGPT to fill in the gaps. If I get charged for ChatGPT I will most likely go back to resharper as you said its IDE integrated and ChatGPT is not atm.

I've also found that it's great at writing boilerplate and the really common stuff, that's pretty much perfect.

The key is to only ask it to do things that you know will work and more or less how to do them. Every time I slip up and ask it something that I don't know and may not be physically possible it'll just make up something that's just convincing enough to waste my time verifying that it doesn't work.

Now, imo, the problem is that there's "value" (to be extracted). How much is 10 mins of your time 4x a day worth? Whatever that is, OpenAI/MS will notice and start charging. A little at first, then what the market will bear. Don't think modern corporations won't take back what they giveth.

That's just medium-term, longer-term I'll leave open to anyone's personal interpretation.

Completely agree. If they start charging for what I am using it for I would switch back to resharper. If I'm going to pay I may as well may it as convenient as possible and integrate it into VS.

I frequently write ChatGPT requests such as: "Create a c# object with the following fields: CustomerID, FirstName, LastName, RegistrationDate" (or the like). The fields might be pasted from a SQL query. It does a pretty remarkable job even guessing the correct types.

You might enjoy Github Copilot. I'm using the free 60 day trial and it's produced some really remarkable code snippets that were very helpful. Also, it's suggested code that was wildly unhelp so YMMV.

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