Ask HN: Is ChatGPT or Co-pilot making you more productive as a developer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is ChatGPT or Co-pilot making you more productive as a developer?

5 pointsedf1312 comments

For me - not yet - maybe a little though, but I am trying both out.

ChatGPT I’m finding useful for more mundane programming sections (file access, content transforms etc)… interesting to see how much more productive it’s making others.

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No, not yet. It's frustrating, I was hoping code completion would be much improved and it doesn't seem to be the case.

I have high hopes that ChatGPT could help us DESIGN better libraries or programming languages though.

Not enough to be game changing yet but for documentation on processes it has helped. Where I do enjoy using it is for learning though and digging into things that have always itched me but I could never bother to find the answers to ( due to slog of search/review cycle ). For example when reviewing history of math I would ask about where the word equation came from, and so on. I always liked to dig a bit beneath and teachers hated that! Not GPT :)

Same. Copilot can get a bit useful after it understands your intent and starts hinting code from your codebase. Or sometimes i completely forget basic stuff like core functions, algos, patterns, and copilot jumps to help. ChatGPT excels at NLP, parsing or data transformations, but usually i use it for exploring general ideas and not necessarily for coding

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3520312.3534864

https://github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-c...

Interesting- thanks

ChatGPT is useful in less complex things, say I want to send a JSON Get request to my server using JQuery. I can easily ask and it returns right away. But as the difficulty rises the code it makes becomes more error-prone.

This, I've been using it daily for small tasks instead of google and it's faster and better. "Write a mongo query in node that gets x,y,z and then returns only the q,w,e fields sorts by y" is one I just wrote. Since I don't write mongo queries often I forget the syntax

Copilot helps me with a function every other day, but I feel like its mostly me trying to have fun and test this thing. Curated snippets would be faster but this is so easy and adapts to the code around.

If you haven't tried it, use the GPT4 model. It's available now with the ChatGPT+ subscription. Significant improvement.

It’s definitely at least $10 of productivity (a matter of minutes for most of us I’m guessing), so I will continue to subscribe.

It really excels when trying to learn new language.

yes, but just for the mundane stuff...

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