Hacker News Reader

Comment by dave333 | Hacker News Reader

Occurs to me as a retired 69 year old former coder that AI makes us old geezers and geezesses somewhat competitive again with our younger colleagues. Need to learn yet another new framework? Let AI do the nitty gritty bit. Capitalize on your experience and higher level know how.

View on HN

This is absolutely the case. You can now code in any language using ChatGPT 4. Just say what you want from it like you were interviewing a developer. Look for potential bugs in the output and ask it about them. Look for memory leaks and ask. Then when you can't see anything else wrong with it ask it whether there are any bugs or edge cases that might cause problems.

Anyone with a bit of experience to know the right questions to ask can now code in any language or platform.

It doesn't work. I asked GPT-4 to migrate the following PHP code to JS:

    $csv = array_map('str_getcsv', file($argv[1]));

And this is the result:

    const csv = readFileSync(filename, 'utf-8').split('\n').map(line => line.split(','));

You can't parse CSV this way, because you need to respect delimiters. Counter example:

    1,"1,5",2

"1,5" being the German notation for "1.5". Hence, a simple split(',') will break this thing.

PHP's str_getcsv is, of course, a proper CSV parser and not a string splitter. Unless your code uses basically zero stdlib API calls, you will have to double check everything.

Please note that this kind of bug isn't even easy to catch if you test CSV file doesn't contain a quoted entry.

One shot code translation is very… September 2023

Hmm but what's the solution? Type out the reasoning for every line of code for an entire codebase?

I wonder if inputting an explicit function call

    $csv = str_getcsv(file($argv[1]))

Would make it easier.

Yes: https://chat.openai.com/share/33466769-1e06-49af-8abd-7a4c0e...

You couldn't get it to work, but it certainly does work: https://chat.openai.com/share/774fbe29-00b9-4e1f-815c-268707...

This is very cool. Interestingly GPT appears to be incorrect when it suggests in the differences, that str_getcsv would not parse correctly quoted parts. It does look like the php function has support for the "enclosure" character hence something like "1,5" should parse correctly.

I’m reminded of those pro StarCraft players who retire at like 30 because, while their strategy is perfect, their fingers simply can’t click or hotkey as fast as the twenty somethings.

I imagine it is the same for any elite level sport. Except perhaps chess.

Actually top level OTB chess ability degrades notably past 50 with a few notable exceptions (Korchnoi, Smyslov). Sure the decline starts a bit later than regular sports but still it is significant.

That is why when Rausis(https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=14248) rating was approaching 2700 in his 50s everyone was very suspicious.

It is partially due to the incredible levels of stamina required to stay on top of the game for 4-6 hours.

Also as Kramnik said when he was retiring, you start making strange(read wrong) decisions suddenly.

Yes, this is my thinking too. No need to learn tons of new frameworks, just ask ChatGPT what framework we can use to do a particular task and ask for sample code. You can learn from that much more easily.

I built an ebook reader in Vue with ChatGPT the other day, never having used Vue before. Took about a day.

Learned absolutely loads - far more than sitting down with a book and trying to learn from that. Not least because I’ve tried before and quickly lost interest.

Instead I’ve learned the basics and made a working web app, which I’m pretty pleased with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com