They still need a programmer to give proper instructions, though. I don't think an end user can prompt them to write anything remotely sophisticated the current technology.
When these tools are able to detect ambiguity in specifications and start asking the right questions to clarify those ambiguities, they will also start being useful for non-programmers.
that has pretty broad applications for all sorts of non-programmers.
yeah, you're right if the goalpost is "please make a HIPAA compliant DBS from scratch for use in California", but most non-programmers aren't really interested in specification compliant programs that meet meticulous measures of rigor; they just want things that simplify their routine when cashing out a customer, organizing their pirated movies, perusing porn sites, whatever it is that people do.
Programming as a metaphor for telling a machine what to do was a great gatekeeper for people for many years, chatgpt and the like are reducing the 'fee to entry' immensely for non-technical people, and I say that as someone who is witnessing non-technical people in my life accomplish things they would have never tried previously.
How much of this is thanks to hundreds of tutorials / question & answers on stack overflow about these tasks?
As AI supplant the sites that host these QnA and professional tutorial writers - even amateur writers might feel miffed that their efforts will be regurgitated by AI with no credit given - how will AI keep up the quality of their responses?
If humans can train themselves without AI, then so can AI train without humans.
I’ve used it to do this very thing and while it was helpful, it really struggled with sticking to either v1 or v2 of the language. It felt like playing whack-a-mole. I would tell it some line was incorrect syntax for v2 and it would apologize, fix that line and break something else.
The bones of the script were good, but I had to do quite a bit of editing.
I don’t feel all that negative about it though because I understand that it will only get better.
I'm told GPT-4 is much better at bug fixes, and there are various options for longer context windows.
Knowing what question to ask, though? The AI seems to contain the knowledge to all the questions, as if I ask them for a list of questions I get a useful response; and now someone has to answer the meta-question of "how do you want to present those questions to a user?" as there are many ways…