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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

For Mac desktop programming and Swift in general, I find ChatGPT quite helpful. It’s been quite good at dredging up the kind of “one weird trick” I tend to need to work with these kind of closed source framework that you can’t truly understand. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to Apple stuff since I’m so used to being able to go-to-source of frameworks in Java/Ruby/Android/Go/C/Javascript programming but ChatGPT at least keeps me unstuck.

At least SwiftUI gives you a very nice paved road of productivity. Again if you need something off the beaten path good luck, but it’s never been easier to make app-shaped tools for Apple platforms.

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ChatGPT has been a godsend for helping me figure out how to use quite a few Mac and iOS APIs in the last year. There are APIs that would’ve taken me an hour or more to work out how to use by searching online, experimenting, digging up old WWDC videos (often the only place to really learn how to use a given API properly), but now it takes seconds of ChatGPT. It’s been a game-changer.

ChatGPT has been similarly helpful for working with xcb/xlib and teasing out the arcane bits of X11. I don’t know how anybody had the patience to sift through the scattered writings on those things before… maybe I just don’t know where to look but I find it much more challenging to dredge up info for than anything related to Apple platform development.

> I don’t know how anybody had the patience to sift through the scattered writings on those things before.

Foundational knowledge. Before you delve into x11, you learn how graphics works at the lower level first, and then you build upon this. Before the actual implementation, there was a design. Once you figure it out, you can guess how the implementation is done. You confirm your guess from the docs and code if it’s available.

My experience as well. While I’d love a proper go to source approach, chatGPT nails most of the issues I run into with SwiftUI.

100%

I put the query in the top of the page into chatGPT with the same requirements (Mac OS, in swift) and I got back detailed explanations, sample code, and basically all the writer was looking for.

Not great that OpenAI is serving as better docs than apple’s own, but at least there is an alternative.

I'm dreaming of the day there would be a chatgpt like thing for all those internal proprietary tools and their "documentation"

What’s the difference you’re imagining from today’s ChatGPT?

ChatGPT knows nothing of those libraries and their code. I can't paste anything into context, because of security reasons :)

Ah I understand now. I have my eye on SourceGraph’s Cody AI, they’re working on an enterprise version, although it’s TBD how locked down it will be: https://sourcegraph.com/cody

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