Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

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Well no, you shouldn't use it for your top-end problems, but your bottom-end problems. Aren't there things that you have to do in your job that really could be done by a junior programmer? Don't you ever have one-off (or once-a-year) things you have to do that each time you have to invest a lot of time refreshing in your brain, and then basically forgetting for lack of use?

Here's an example I used the other day: Our project had lost access to our YT channel, which had 350+ videos on it (due to someone's untimely passing and a lack of redundancy). I had used yt-dlp to download all the old videos, including descriptions. Our community manager had uploaded all the videos, but wasn't looking forward to copy-and-pasting every description into the new video.

So I offered to use GPT-4 to write a python script to use the API to do that for her. I didn't know anything about the YT API, nor am I an expert in python. I wouldn't have invested the time learning the YT API (and trying to work through my rudimentary python knowledge) for a one-off thing like this, but I knew that GPT-4 would be able to help me focus on what to do rather than how to do it. The transcript is here:

https://chat.openai.com/share/936e35f9-e500-4a4d-aa76-273f63...

By contrast, I don't think there's any possible way the current generation could have identified, or helped fix, this problem that I fixed a few years ago:

https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/xsa299/0011-x86-mm-Don-t-...

(Although it would be interesting to try to ask it about that to see how well it does.)

The point of using GPT-4 should be to take over the "low value" work from you, so that you have more time and mental space to focus on the "high value" work.

> Don't you ever have one-off (or once-a-year) things you have to do that each time you have to invest a lot of time refreshing in your brain, and then basically forgetting for lack of use?

Not really. In AAA game programming, you mostly own the same systems you specialize in throughout the production process.

For example, someone in Rockstar North might work on the minimap for the entire production of a game.

In smaller AAA companies, a person might own vehicles or horses, or even the entire progression system. But still, programmers are rarely working on disconnected things.

You rarely step out of your expertise zone. And you are usually expected to perform much better than GPT would in that zone.

> Aren't there things that you have to do in your job that really could be done by a junior programmer?

Hardly, because explaining how basically everything fits together is the hard and central part. Thus, the way to make things doable by a junior programmer is to teach him to become much better in programming and the software that is developed (which the company attempts). Until then, there are few things where a junior programmer is of productive help.

> Don't you ever have one-off (or once-a-year) things you have to do that each time you have to invest a lot of time refreshing in your brain, and then basically forgetting for lack of use?

Hardly, because I have a pretty good long-time memory.

Perhaps by learning to use the YT API (seriously something that should take 2 hours max if you know how http works) you'll learn something from their design choices, or develop opinions on what makes a good API. And by learning a bit more python you'll get exposed to patterns you could use in your own language.

If anything, using GPT-4 makes a lot of that more efficient. Rather than scrolling through loads of API documentation trying to guess how to do something, writing Python with a "C" accent, I can just read the implementation that GPT-4 spits out, which is almost certainly based on seeing hundreds of examples written by people who are fluent in python, and thus using both to best effect.

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