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Comment by happycube | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, one can use ChatGPT as only a starting point and to learn from there. One isn't stuck with actually using what it outputs verbtim, and really shouldn't until at least a hypothetical GPT-6 or 7... and to use it fully now, one has to know how to nudge it when it goes into a bad direction.

So overall it's more an amplifier than anything else.

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I have a lot of juniors floating around my co-op and when I watch them use chatgpt it seems it becomes a dependency. In my opinion it's harming their ability to learn. Rather than thinking through problems they'll just toss every single roadblock they hit instantly into a chatgpt prompt.

To be fair I've been doing the same thing with simple mathematics into a calculator in my browser that at this point I'm pretty sure I'd fail at long division by hand.

Maybe it won't matter in a few years and their chatgpt skills will be well honed, but if it were me in their position I wouldn't gamble on it.

Yeah that's my larger point about the guy and the pattern. It doesn't lead to growth. I've seen zero growth whatsoever.

And he slacks coworkers like he is talking to ChatGPT too, slinging code blobs without context, example input data, or the actual error he received..

> Yeah that's my larger point about the guy and the pattern. It doesn't lead to growth. I've seen zero growth whatsoever.

If Chat GPT can solve a problem consistently well, I don't think it's worth the effort to master it.

My examples are regexes, command lines to manipulate files, kafka/zookeeper commands to explore a test environment.

For me it's a big win in that regard.

> So overall it's more an amplifier than anything else.

Overall it would be an amplifier if that were how the majority used it. Sadly I don't believe that to be the case.

That's been the case with every technology made by man since fire.

Yup. We should embrace it, but without be naïve about what great things it's bringing us :)

Ouch! Hot!

If the results were more akin to a google or stack overflow where there was a list of results with context.. sure.

But people are using the singular response as "the answer" and moving on..

Phind is a bit more like this

> If the results were more akin to a google or stack overflow where there was a list of results with context.. sure.

I don't think the history of the usage of either shows that most people make any use of that context.

Especially these days you have to know how to use/read Google and SO results too.

(And I should have said ChatGPT4 earlier, if you're a bad to medicore developer taking ChatGPT3.5 literally you'll probably wind up in a Very Bad Place.)

This has been my experience as well - For repetitive things, If what you're looking for is the shitty first draft, it's a way to get things started.

After that, you can shape the output - without GPT's help - into something that you can pull off the shelf again as needed and drop it into where you want it to go, because at that point in the process, you know it works.

> nudge it when it goes into a bad direction

It happenes a few times for me that Chat GPT gets stuck in a bullshit loop and I can't get it unstuck.

Sure I could summarise the previous session for Chat GPT and try again, but I'm too tired at that point.

I get that with humans sometimes too. Even here, even before LLMs became popular. Someone gets primed on some keyword, then goes off on a direction unrelated to whatever it was I had in mind and I can't get them to change focus — and at least one occasion (here) where I kept saying ~"that's not what I'm talking about" only to be eventually met (after three rounds of this) with the accusation that I was moving the goalposts :P

Yeah, regardless of hallucinations and repeating the same mistake even after you tell it to fix it, iterating with ChatGPT is so much less stressful than iterating with another engineer.

I almost ruined my relationship with a coworker because they submitted some code that took a dependency on something it shouldn't have, and I told them to remove the dependency. What I meant was "do the same thing you did, but instead of using this method, just do what this method does inside your own code." But they misinterpreted it to mean "Don't do what this method does, build a completely different solution." Repeated attempts to clarify what I meant only dug the hole deeper because to them I was just complaining that their solution was different from how I would've done it.

Eventually I just showed them in code what I was asking for (it was a very small change!) and they got mad at me for making such a big deal over 3 lines of code. Of course the whole point was that it was a small change that would avoid a big problem down the road...

So I'll take ChatGPT using library methods that don't exist, no matter how much you tell them to fix it, over that kind of stress any day.

Use the edit button

>One isn't stuck with actually using what it outputs verbtim, and really shouldn't until at least a hypothetical GPT-6 or 7... and to use it fully now, one has to know how to nudge it when it goes into a bad direction.

Exactly.

chatGPT is the single smartest person you can ask about anything, and has unlimited patience.

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