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Comment by felipefar | Hacker News Reader

I don't use it, it returns mostly incorrect code that makes me realize it's not worth it. I'm more productive and write better code ignoring ChatGPT 95% of the time.

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my comment will probably get flagged or downvoted or whatever, but yeah agreed.

I literally cannot understand how people code that need gpt as an assistant for writing code. If I can reason about it, I can write it faster then the feedback loop takes for prompting.

It's for new things: new languages, frameworks, libraries. When you're not fluent, it can be a helpful hand for a beginner, or someone who has to do a lot things that they are not expert in, like a one man band in a sole enterprise or corner of a startup.

It can increase efficiency for generalists. For deep work, it's less useful.

I agree. That so far the super specialist can do better. But they will also find useful when they need to cross the domain that are good at with something that they are yet a beginner. Also, for mechanical things, it is amazing. Like, for helping solving a conflict of a patch with a context, or editing lots of parts in a code with something that it would require multiple regexps.

I agree with your experience, and am curious as to what the difference between the two scenarios is.

I always wanted to do this very specific in Django. I don't work with Python,so even though I knew what I want to do,but my skills weren't there to create working code. So I thought I'll throw the problem at chatGPT. The generated code had a couple of flaws, but I managed to fix them in 15 min or so and got a working result. The code also gave me some interesting perspective on how some things could be implemented.

That’s interesting since I threw some questions at it about Django and I didn’t think it gave very idiomatic patterns for it.

What it generated in Django was very simple and likely far from the quality an experienced engineer would come up with, but at my knowledge level that was enough.

If you iterate and ask it to provide more idiomatic patterns, it will!

No offense, but I wouldn't hire you based on your resistance to learning new technology.

You haven't spent enough time with GPT-4 and CoPilot to understand how LLMs can save you time. There is a reason why the world's top engineers like Andrej Kaparthy[1] and Guido van Rossum[2] are using these tools, they save a ton of time and work when used correctly.

[1] https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1608895189078380544

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KjSkGgaJ1k

Personally I'm using these tools for coding, research, and writing. Anyone who doesn't understand how much they can accelerate these tasks when used effectively are going to get left in the dust. I've spoken to colleagues who don't seem to get it as well, it's strange to me

I've had the same experience and agree. I've talked to engineers who initially have the same standoff-ish opinion, then after a few weeks of using the tools end up changing their minds and adopting them.

I find it is really useful for giving me a base to start from, especially when it’s writing code for tools that I am not very comfortable with. It usually won’t spit out the ultimate solution on the first try, but it can give me an idea of how to modify what it gave to do exactly what I want, in way less time than actually writing it.

The use case where it's really good is boilerplate code that you may not remember. For example, I haven't written React code for years now. I know what good React code looks like when I see it because I've worked with it before, but I wouldn't be able to implement something from scratch without googling or copying stuff from Github. I just don't remember the libraries and best practices off the top of my head.

When I ask ChatGPT to do it for me it gives me an excellent starting point. Sure, there will be bugs, but because I know what I want I can spot and fix them immediately. It's much faster to adjust ChatGPT's code than it is to Google around for starting points.

Another example are shell scripts. I only touch bash once every few months and I keep forgetting the syntax for certain operations. Asking ChatGPT to give me a starting point is much faster than googling and visiting 20 StackOverflow posts for what I want.

But I agree with you that for day-to-day work on the same codebase where you have all the context, ChatGPT usually isn't worth it.

Did you try GPT4? The quality are far better.

My experience is that it is also pretty good a debugging its own mistakes too.

Try to use for s context that you are not too good yet.

What do you use it for 5% of the time then?

not OP, but I can guess: shell scripts. its great for 'i have this shape text/files and i need this other shape'.

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