Interesting, my impression was that ChatGPT helps experienced SWEs by filling out large amounts of boilerplate-ish code. It sounds like that's not your experience, though?
At the same time, I see my 9 year old girl using ChatGPT to create Minecraft extensions; she has no prerequisites for actually developing software, but she manages to make some small extensions and have them work either way.
Acknowledging that she doesn't actually learn much from this, I think one can assume that everything in between (e.g. using ChatGPT for pair learning) is definitely also possible.
But whatever AI is outputting, there's no way these qualified guesses can beat experience from a professional developer. I know that the output will never be better than the prompt, but sometimes the output - no matter how much effort you put into the prompt - is visibly just a qualified guess.
I would say with someone new to coding it can be bad and good, as a lot of times it glosses over things, or can be slightly incorrect as it makes assumptions (or more so just answers in a more general context, and when asked to elaborate, or challenged on specifics it will reformat/improve it's answer, but without knowing you need to do so, I could see it easily see it providing half-baked foundational knowledge. You can ask it "x" and it will give a answer, but then if you ask it I am trying to do "y" with "x" and isn't "z" an issue or area of concern with its answer it will reformulate the information provided as its original response was flawed, but if you don't know exactly what the "y" you want to do is, or the "z" being foundational knowledge to challenge it on, you can easily get a whole wall of text that is out of context with what you are actually trying to learn.
This is my hang up with LLMs … I don’t trust them.
Frankly it seems just as easy if not easier to just google keywords and read sites.
Google vs LLM is like asking random people on the internet (some are brilliant, some don’t know anything, some are nuts, … etc.) vs asking random people on the internet but all of them have a history of suffering from hallucinations and are routine liars with a compulsive need to answer confidently even when they know nothing.
Sounds like a description of narcissistic personality disorder or schizoaffective. Of course proto ai would have a personality disorder, go figure.
In the future, the job of an ai psychologist will be to certify the personality of ai products. Gotta make sure you’re not shipping a shrink wrapped psychopath.
I would like an AI to tell me if I’m reinventing the wheel or if something similar can be abstracted. Whether what I’m doing aligns with existing patterns in the codebase. How the application as a whole could be refactored to improve maintainability, performance, or both.
This can all already be done by a human with experience and context, so it must be possible with AI. This will be the biggest game changer for me.
Maybe it's good for some languages, or for code that's doing the exact stuff a hundred people have already written. Copilot X certainly looks cool, but who knows when that'll be ready.
I find it especially helpful with SQL queries, and with boilerplate type code. It’s also very helpful when I’d need to lookup the usage of various methods. I just start with the comments and most of the time it saves me the context switch to the browser to lookup the usage.
But the more exeperienced you are, more valuable your output is (in most cases). So the 10% of your productivity could be more valuable than a novice's 50%.
It might change eventually as ide integrations improve, but for now it's a novelty for me.
Imagine, a vision of the future... A thousand million chatbots, all outputting 2018 JavaScript
A good craftsman crafts his own tools.
I call bullshit. Your task is to deliver a project that does what it's supposed to, all in a timely fashion. You do whatever it takes, including getting rid of old code and rewriting stuff if it makes you more productive overall.
Writing code that does what you want is much faster than taking someone else's code and twist it to do something it was not written to do. You should always be very careful about what dependencies you use, as most often you will have to deal with their limitations and bugs, and they could kill your project.
If you had 20 separate people who contributed to the same thing and left then you most likely have huge code debt. Managing that sort of thing is a daily task for any software engineer. Apparently your strategy is to just add debt onto the pile and put your head in the sand pretending it's not your problem. Instead you should plan tactical refactoring moves to make the codebase leaner and better able to adapt to the business needs, all without breaking any existing functionality and workflows.
You're asking "when". That's the wrong question. It's up to you to manage your time and invest it into tasks that help you save time later on. A software engineer is usually not paid by the hour either, so you just do the work until you're satisfied with the effort you've put in.
He does not make his own tools. He buys them, because there are already extremely talented tool-makers who are very good at their craft.
Certainly a lot of youtube woodworkers do that, can't say I work wood myself.
But saws, blades, chisels… maybe he could make them, but why? Metalworking is its own subject of mastery.
AFAIK, he doesn’t often modify any tools of that sort. He spends time selecting the one he wants, yes.
He also makes paddles, which are still expensive (I think the cheapest starts at about $1000), but some people actually use those.