Comment by allenu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by allenu | Hacker News Reader

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I do Mac/iOS development and am constantly asking ChatGPT about various APIs and frameworks. Apple's documentation is not great for explaining how to actually use APIs, unless you can find the one WWDC video that explains it or a sample project that they released years ago. I would normally google for sample code, blog posts, tutorials, or Stack Overflow posts. Something that might take an hour of searching and reading now takes a few seconds of just asking ChatGPT.

Even for things that I've done before, it's often much easier to ask ChatGPT how to do something than to look through my projects to find how I did it previously. It might sound lazy, but if it takes me several minutes to search through various projects to find that one time I did something, why bother when I can just ask ChatGPT and know in seconds?

I will say that yes, ChatGPT can hallucinate APIs that don't exist, and that can be annoying, but even if it does it 20% of the time, it's still incredibly valuable in the time savings the other 80% of the time it does hit.

I wonder how this is affecting what you consider knowledge going forward. This strikes me as students using google to answer homework questions and forgoing the actual “learning” part.

I don't really think of it that way. I've been doing Mac and iOS development for over ten years now. A lot of the info I gleaning is not design techniques or stuff that I feel is worth memorizing. It's more what functions are available to do something and what types are needed to interact with an API.

A common thing I've searched for, for instance, is the various date formatting options and types I need for managing time zones. I suppose I could sit down and learn the plethora of options, but I don't see that is information that's worth memorizing internally. Similarly, I suppose I could really internalize the complete syntax of regular expressions, but is it worth it? I've used them so many times before ChatGPT, but I've not memorized absolutely all the options available to me.

The other side of the coin is this is allowing me to make so much progress that I'm needing to even use more APIs than I would've previously. If I had done it the old way, I might only have time and energy to devote to a small number of tasks, but with ChatGPT I can "explore" more territory than I wouldn't have previously.

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