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Comment by yberreby | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is distinguishing between these parts requires me to be be an expert in the area I’m inquiring about - and then why the heck do I need to ask some idiot bot for answers to questions that I already know an answer to?

Because it can be significantly faster to check something for correctness than to produce it?

More so when the correctness check can itself be automated to some extent.

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> ecause it can be significantly faster to check something for correctness than to produce it

Erm no There are many things that cant be easily checked especially if you dont know the topic well

Youre right but I think the point still stands. Many times it really is easier to verify than produce. Compilable code being a good example.

I dunno about you, but I spend a LOT of my time fixing code that was broken in some subtle way the compiler didn't catch

If we're talking about generating and integrating sample code, it's great at that

Anything more advanced and it's a footgun

I have very quickly picked up the habit of pasting snippets of my code into GPT-4 and simply asking "Why is this not working?" Almost every time, it succinctly explains the apparent purpose of the code, and how it is subtly wrong.

It's so good that I often do this preemptively to avoid a compile/deploy/test cycle.

Indeed, but I'm not claiming it's always faster to check than to produce. Simply that when it is the case, using GPT-4 can be worth it. It is to me - I use it daily.

My experience with Github copilot is that the time it saves me typing out boilerplate has been more than lost when I have to spend time carefully debugging bugs in the code it produces. And those are the bugs I catch right away.

I expect this will improve but it's certainly not always the case that checking something is cheaper or easier than generating it in the first place.

I was torn on Copilot - it seemed like it was saving me time, but I found myself getting way more value out of just copy / pasting code into GPT4.

So I decided to stop my copilot subscription and just see how I go without it.

I've been off copilot for a few days now and other than having to do more code lookups it's not a terrible experience not having it. It does feel like something that should be baked into the IDE for free though.

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