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Comment by snapcaster | Hacker News Reader

Have you considered that it may be a personal skill issue? I'm not saying it is, but it seems like people with this opinion never seem to consider maybe they aren't using it properly or don't get it

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The reverse could also be true.

Some people could be not able to figure out that the code GPT produced is not good because they lack the skill level to review it efficiently.

Well, maybe. But it seems to me this somewhat defeats the purpose. If I tell ChatGPT to write me, say, a sorting algorithm (which I'm sure it can do), but if I ask it _wrongly_ it gives me a deceptively looking lemon of a solution, that's a liability.

Conversely, could you share an example of a nontrivial, practical programming problem ChatGPT can solve, but only if you use it right?

For coding it's mostly Copilot that saves time. Although ChatGPT in some cases as well, but not as reliably or frequently.

Agree, Copilot is a huge speed boost for stubbing things out, auto-generating the dead simple parts, and refactoring. ChatGPT is awesome for rubberducking, pair programming, brainstorming, and figuring out what that thing that you kind of remember is called. We aren't at the point where we can just say "robot, do my work" but it's for sure good enough to take care of the boring stuff and be a sounding board.

A lot of this attitude is seething below the surface these days. It's like linkedin. You may not like the thought of it but you better get over it unless you want a lot of opportunity to whiff by you unnoticed. Senior devs have an attitude against using chat gpt for some reason. Luddites. Use it or lose it.

Maybe the senior devs just don't find it as useful as junior devs do. Or maybe the senior devs are better at picking apart the code being generated and finding the flaws.

I'm a senior dev at a python shop and I almost never find the solutions GPT4 gives in Python to be very good. However, I've been learning some C# lately in my free time and I find those solutions to be pretty good. I have a feeling I find the C# solutions higher quality, because I'm not experienced enough to see the problems.

Haha I have the exact same experience as you except swap the languages...that one feeling you get when you are reading a newspaper article you are expert on and suddenly realize how inaccurate everything is.

Oh I'm keen for an unpaid robot to do a lot of my job for me. I just haven't been able to outsource that. Whenever I try, it's more work to fix its errors than to do it from scratch.

I would really like to know what I'm doing wrong (or if everyone else is in the same boat).

You have be very specific in your prompts. "Senior engineers" are most likely treating it like a Google search from 2005.

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