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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I'm not trying to shame you, but how long have you been coding? I've not yet had the urge to ask an AI for coding help, ever. The questions that are decoupled enough from a field/project that it might be able to answer seem trivial and easy just to search on.

Plus, I'm way more trusting of a Stack Overflow post or even a blog post than what AI generates. I mean, AI hallucinates all the time or generates things that are subtly wrong, so unless you can write the code yourself how can you trust the generated stuff?

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I'm pretty shocked by the grandparent, but on reflection, I think this is the future.

In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck writes about the travails of a family's trip to California in search of work during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Tom Joad, the father, fixes the compression in his blown engine by wrapping a copper wire around the cylinder, then running the motor until it melts and recreates the seal. It's such an ingenious hack, and reflects such deep knowledge of how an engine works, that it's stuck with me for decades.

Today, I bet fewer than 5% of vehicle owners even know how to check their tire pressure. But it's not like fewer people are driving, or cars are more likely to be found by the side of the road with a blown engine—it's just far less necessary to know these things. I think programming will go this way, too.

Copper melts at over 1000C that seems questionable.

Might have been bronze or tin—I read the book a long time ago! That said, burning gasoline or kerosine can be over 2000°C[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_flame_temperature

steel melts around 1600, the engine would blow up waaay before.

the problem with that story is that if the "seal" is made from a simple material that melts by the engine heat, then it will not seal for long. (or at all.) but likely it's not what Steinbeck wrote.

At what temperature does copper soften enough to squish into a seal shape?

I seem to remember my dad shimming a cylinder that had lost compression with a copper ring; I was a kid so I don't remember any details except it wasn't intended to melt, and whatever it was intended to do worked and we saw the car still being driven around town fifteen or twenty years after he sold it.

it's possible that the car got a replacement part eventually :)

copper becomes ductile between 300-600 C ( https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/docs/documents/1353/tempe... )

piston ring seals are usually made of cast iron or steel. copper would probably work too for a while, it's good at conducting heat, there's ample cooling in engines, so it wouldn't melt, just wear out very quickly ... and then the engine performance degrades as the sealing gets worse and worse (and it starts to eat oil, soot gets everywhere, exhaust becomes visible), mpg goes down, but ... the car would probably run. (loss of 1 out of 4 pistons is not a catastrophic failure)

While it's a nice story, unfortunately it would appear as though Steinbeck didn't do enough research and thought the 1925 Dodge was built much like a Model T: <https://forums.aaca.org/topic/134313-the-grapes-of-wrath/>

Hah, this is great. Guess I'm going to have to update my analogy bank.

It's a rubber duck that talks back. Chat Gpt is amazing for programming. I'm not OP but I've been coding since 2009.

I'm not trying to shame you, but how long have you been coding?

You're not using the tools available to make you a better and more productive programmer?

If you're not using AI as part of your daily workflow you are burning time and money and not maximising your potential.

If I was your team lead I'd give you a warning, same as I would if you didn't use an IDE or source control.

Being ignorant of programming productivity tools isn't something to be proud of.

You should have been up to speed by now on using ChatGPT as part of your daily workflow - it's been out since the start of the year.

I've been coding since I was 8, so... 30 years, about 17 professionally.

I'm not averse to new tools at all, but I've yet to see where I would want copilot or chatgpt. The problems I work on daily, like most professional devs, are very specific to how I adapt a large proprietary codebase to do new things to fit specific business requirements, or working with designers and project managers to figure out how we should solve these intricate problems together. AI can't help with that. It'd take a 20 page prompt for it to roughly understand the business even.

It can help with toy problems like how to write a well known algorithm, but given that these are well known algorithms and it's basically just copying from open source repo's (with scary legal ambiguity), it's of little use to what I actually do day to day.

I'm amused that as a lead you'd "give me a warning ". I've literally never worked with a lead or manager that cares what tools people use, only that the work is good. Actually, if anything a lot of workplaces are asking people to seek approval before using AI, because of the many thorny issues (copyright being one of many)

(BTW, I do use chat gpt, just not for coding. It's useful for creative tasks or summaries. I still google what it says because it does make shit up)

How do you deal with NDAs and privacy issues? Do you not work on any code which is not OK to share with Microsoft?

> If I was your team lead I'd give you a warning, same as I would if you didn't use an IDE or source control.

I really think you mix up

a) common rules as they are needed to work together and (like style or source control) b) local tooling / someone is organizing his own workspace

including an dictator-like "MY way of working is the best!" attitude after disovering whatever works out for YOU. If I was your team lead, I guess I would give you a warning. :-D

Additionally, I guess your programming problems are very generic.

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