I asked chatgpt about the api for an old programming game called chipwits.. it invented a whole programming language that it called chiptalk with an amalgam of the original chipwits stuff, missing some bits and adding others, and generated a parser for it, which I implemented and got to work, before figuring out how much was imaginary, after talking to the original chipwits devs. They found it pretty amusing.

I'm fast learning Django and even though it's an extremely well documented space, ChatGPT has sent me down the wrong path more than a handful of times.

This is especially difficult because I don't know when it's wrong and it's so damn confident. I've gotten better at questioning its correctness when the code doesn't perform as expected but initially it cost me upwards of 30min per time.

Still, I would say between ChatGPT and Copilot - I'm WAY further ahead.

my biggest problem with it is that it doesn't seem to understand its own knowledge. If you talk to it for a while and you go back and forth on a coding problem it will often suddenly start using wrong syntax that doesn't exist. Even though at this point it should already know and have looked up for sure that this syntax can't possibly exist because many times it responded correctly. So in human terms it has read the documentation and must know that this syntax can't possibly exist and yet it doesn't know that 10 sec later. That's currently what makes it seem like a not real intelligence to me.

One of the advantages of Bing, and do guess now ChatGPT with browsing plugin, is that it's able to search on the web for the right API.

To be fair, using APIs that I think should exist, is how I develop most of my APIs.

A simple metric on confidence interval could do the trick. As the model grows larger, it is getting more difficult to understand what is going on, but that doesn't mean that it needs to be a total black box. At least let it throw some proxy metrics. In due course, will learn to interpret those metrics and adjust our internal trust model.

I wonder if a plugin to let it query API docs would solve this problem.

Also it makes up Python libraries, macOS apps to do certain tasks, etc.