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Comment by janwillemb | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not a developer by profession (my dev concepts are from university ten years ago) so this work had a lot of help from ChatGPT and the main purpose was to learn new technologies and new concepts, so please be gentle. If you have recommendations for any topic please let me know.

Well done, then, to have created such a seemingly complete system.

I don't know if you are the original developer, but aren't you afraid to have made mistakes that will bite you later? Such as security stuff or other errors that will be hard to correct.

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I've been an amateur programmer for a long, long time. I've never had the time to really get fluent in coding. (I'm the type of coder who can lose an hour to stupid typos and similar bugs that should be easy to spot.)

I use ChatGPT to help with projects, generate code, point out problems with my code, etc.

It usually gets more "edge cases" figured out than I would without it, especially for implementing common functions. I also ask it to plug security holes in my code, and again, it does better than I would without it.

Just yesterday, it gave me seven different strategies for dealing with bots filling out forms. I implemented a couple in just a few minutes, and the bot problem immediately stopped.

Will mistakes happen? Of course -- but AI tools can help prevent them, especially when combined with one's own critical thinking. (I often correct the AI, ask for assistance in terms of preventing specific types of problems, or use prompts based on my own pre-existing knowledge, which then gets better answers than I would get otherwise.)

> I'm the type of coder who can lose an hour to stupid typos and similar bugs that should be easy to spot.

Oh, a seasoned pro then :-)

Yeah that's me too. I lost a week on the datasets test/ folder being completely empty too.

I realize that most people think "professional coders" are on top of their profession and can find bugs with advanced debugger features.

The reality is that MOST people in the professsion never reach that level and are probably on the same level that you are right now.

It feels like there is a really long tail of really good coders but the median coder is actually pretty... average.

I'm putting this out there so that you can get over imposter syndrome. What you did here is amazing and a lot of professional coders would give up pretty quickly and get stuck on the first implementation steps.

Not the op or the author but any and all developers will make mistakes. Experience just moves the threshold of obvious mistakes into less obvious ones. What’s impressive is that the author built a system and presumably opened it to community feedback which could potentially lead to better result than an experience developer working in solitude and worry over security for years. I appreciate the honest disclaimer at the top as well.

On teams I work on I usually socialize the ideas that it’s not mistakes that matter, but the speed of discovery and fixing that is important. Then it’s important to establish self-enforcing systems that make sure they never happen again. That is linters, unit tests, type systems, CI/CD etc. I jokingly call this humility-based development.

“aren't you afraid to have made mistakes that will bite you later? Such as security stuff or other errors that will be hard to correct.”

If you let this fear control you, you will never actually make anything. Even the most experienced developers will make some of these mistakes. Anyone who thinks they have progressed beyond them needs more experience to see the truth.

The best way to learn is to work on projects and make those mistakes, then figure out how to fix them. The harder it is to fix, the more likely future projects will consider it in the design from the start.

The OP looks to be using sha2 for password hashing at a cursory glance at the PHP so I’d say highly likely. I suppose everything, AI or novice, is just a matter of degree of wrongness.

Afraid of what..? What’s the risk?

I wonder if ChatGPT suggested PHP, because that is a very bizarre choice.

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