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Comment by laichzeit0 | Hacker News Reader

Some of my most recent ChatGPT interactions:

    34.223.203.0/28 what is the end ip of this range?

    Write python code to strip out characters that are not alphanumeric or spaces

    How do make FastAPI not return nulls in the response model when values don't exist?

    Rewrite this javascript to python <snippet of javascript code>

Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift through comments. Also the last one is not something that's suited to StackOverflow. I feel I may be getting dumber, but also programming is not all that interesting to me that I would care to remember the details of any of these things.

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The benefit of “sifting through answers” on StackOverflow is that you learn about different perspectives and about possible caveats. You tend to get a more complete picture. At least for me, that makes human-discussed content much more valuable.

It’s a bit like reading HN comment threads vs. asking an LLM for its take on a submission.

In theory this is right... But in practice I don't find that SO actually does a particularly good job of this. But nothing really does, unfortunately. When I want this kind of nuance, I end up digging through threads in all kinds of different places (including but not limited to SO) for ages.

I agree. Too often on Stack Overflow are incorrect answers upvoted, and correct answers are absent or buried.

With ChatGPT, when it provides incorrect answers I've had good luck explaining the error. ChatGPT usually revises answers into useful output.

Yes, it's the back and forth that I highly value, and that is entirely absent (indeed, impossible) on SO.

I am frequently saying things like "no, that's not right, ..." or "no, that's not what I meant, ..." or "could you keep this part, which seems good, but replace the rest with a different approach like ...".

Think how rude it would be to micro-manage a volunteer answer on SO!

All I learn whenever I follow a link there is that the powers that be have decided that ‘this question is off-topic for Stack-Overflow’ and it has already been answered in a location that is now unavailable.

The site is a big douchey middle finger. A dismissive know it all that actually doesn’t know all that much.

Wouldn't you normally chose the answer marked as answer marked on Stack Overflow or the one with the most points?

ChatGPT doesn't offer that kind of user feedback, so you have no measure if the answer is valid if you don't know the topic well enough

If I can find a question that matches mine exactly, sure. Otherwise due to the imprecision of searching on google, I'm often left to filter through results, and then in each result that seems relevant filtering through each answer that seems relevant, sometimes never getting a perfect match.

ChatGPT does offer user feedback of a kind though -- e.g. I can tell it "no, not like that, more like x" and it will take that into consideration.

This is something that does concern me for people who are new to software engineering and haven't developed any "taste". But for me, I can sniff out bad or just mediocre answers from the bot and ask it for better ones, or go seek them out elsewhere (like on SO).

I use chatgpt (and copilot) for this same kind of stuff.

I don't at all think it's making me dumber. I'm spending more of my time learning and doing the far more interesting and creative domain-specific parts of my work. That is, it's making me smarter by freeing up time to focus on things that matter a lot more. Just like any other tool I've learned to use to automate away drudgery in the past.

The eternal paradox of tools is that they make those who don't need the tool more efficient and tend to inhibit learning in those who do need them.

Take a pocket calculator for example. If you already know arithmetic, calculators make you more efficient, but they are a terrible way to teach arithmetic.

Yes I totally agree, and I think this is the hard part. I absolutely worry about this for people just entering software engineering. I rely on "taste" a huge amount to figure out whether I'm being told something useful or worthless, and I developed that intuition through years of experience not having an AI to ask.

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