Comment by kdkfods | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kdkfods | Hacker News Reader

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You're right, I don't get it. I eagerly signed up for the Bing waitlist and it was a fun novelty for a few hours, having it write limericks, but when it comes to work the best it can do is paraphrase documentation and insert errors. It doesn't and cannot understand the proprietary and complex problem domain I deal with at work, and while it might be able to generate REST boilerplate for me to fill in.. the filling in is the hard part. Emacs already makes boilerplate generation extremely simple.. simpler than explaining the problem to a bot in English and then checking its work, for sure.

It's pretty good at finding examples in documentation and explaining them, I guess, which is helpful for trivial things but my work isn't trivial anymore.

Heck, maybe I'm just lost on this because I haven't used SO very much in recent years.. I'm mostly looking at documentation directly, or very often reading internal code that has no documentation

How is ChatGPT supposed to help me, especially if I don't send it any sensitive information?

So yeah, I guess I don't get it

I'm not so sure I agree with the fact that it's just generating boilerplate, or that "filling in is the hard part". It's quite good at filling in details. I've asked it several times over the past week to generate a simple rest api, using specified languages, to hit an endpoint I have some reasonable assumption exists. It generates all of that, and maybe the url isn't exactly correct but the subdomain is new to me, but I can then go to github and find similar subdomains published and already be off to the races with a fully functioning api. You have to be specific in what you want, even if you're just listing things. Want it to generate variables that are gender neutral, add that. Be aware of the meta instructions as well, such as generating the output using a different tone, to not search the web, or specifically outlining its response with "generate an essay title about... [out] now create 3 major points to support that".

But, here's one of the major catches, it cannot generate based on information newer than 2021. If your tools, frameworks, whatever, has changed significantly post 2021, you're in for a hilarious time.

It also cannot generate solutions that don't already exist - but here's the catch, most people overestimate their work complexity. A solution for them already exists in the wild, they just need to find it, well actually first they need to break down their problem.

I think once people are aware of the limitations and get a little better at finessing a prompt, they'll get much better results than just "emacs boilerplate generation".

> I've asked it several times over the past week to generate a simple rest api, using specified languages, to hit an endpoint I have some reasonable assumption exists.

this is boilerplate

20 years ago you would import an IDL template provided by the API and the tooling would do all of this for you

(but we regressed to this weird HTTP/javascript world where everything is 10x more time consuming and error prone than it used to be)

It is, but it's not as if my example was exhaustive. Get more flexible with your prompts and your boilerplate starts looking a lot like an entire days worth - not just "emacs boilerplate".

Same experience here. Most of my career has been in aerospace simulation. The answers to my nontrivial problems were not in Google or StackOverflow in the first place.

GPT can clearly help with the easy stuff, but that's really not very impactful, and honestly, feels more cumbersome to me than using other existing non-AI help.

Usually a problem can be split into many parts. Are you not able to get ChatGPT to solve some of them individually without understanding your work domain?

Here's the thing though - I don't need you to get it. I just need you to not be as competitive with me because I get it.

I'm not saying this maliciously, more just: that's what's going to happen. Across society.

> I just need you to not be as competitive with me because I get it.

If these things are as effective as proponents claim, your real competition isn't other people. It's with your tools.

I do not disagree with you.

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