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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been developing software professionally for over 20 years now, and ChatGPT/GH Copilot are the biggest productivity enhancers I’ve seen since code completion.

Earlier today, I used ChatGPT to help me bang out a Ruby script to clone a repository, extract its documentation, and add those docs to another site that will serve as a centralized documentation source for a collection of projects.

I know Ruby and have been using it since 2007, but I still have to look things up with it all the time. By giving ChatGPT a bunch of poorly worded, lazily proofed commands, I was able to cut the time of development probably in half.

It wouldn’t be nearly as good with a language I didn’t know, but saying it’s a waste of time and money feels like it’s really missing the sea change that’s happening.

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Yes, it's going to excel at understanding programming languages, which have rigid structures and clearly defined commands whose inputs and outputs could never be misunderstood by a computer. And more power to ya if it saves developers a bunch of time, but it's being built and hyped as something that can do everything for everyone, which it very clearly can't. It has already pushed the customer service industry into a far, far more irritating direction, for example.

I sort of disagree, you could try manning the hotline of customer service for a month or so. Ideally for a terrible company with an endless river of customers self pity and a lovely linear script that offers no good solutions 90% of the time. You end one call, the next starts immediately, max productivity the full 8 hours.

I’d say 50% of the time CoPilot suggests things that are not helpful, 40% of the time it saves me some typing, and 10% of the time it reads my mind and fills out a large section of code for me perfectly (using all my idioms, naming, code “accent”, etc). That 10% is spooky - I’m witnessing literal magic. This isn’t going away.

> biggest productivity enhancers I’ve seen since code completion

I’m still productive without ever having pursued any code completion features, and I think one aspect of your productivity you are leaving out is “is your bump in productivity equal to, or preferably favorable to, its costs?”.

What Rube Goldberg type of a mechanism of misery has to happen to help you complete your code?

Such as the blatant disregard for creatives’ licensing stipulations, tech companies building nuclear reactors, the political elevation of the scumbags who run these companies, et al?

~“I saved 10 keystrokes, and it only cost my grandchildren their clean drinking water.”

tech companies building nuclear reactors

I hope they build lots of them. The alternative is that they use fossil gas which continues to heat up our atmosphere. Nuclear fission is certainly not problem-free (Hanford, three mile island, Chernobyl, etc), but it’s a whole lot better than pushing us past 2°C.

For clarity, I am pro nuclear power.

That said, I do worry specifically about tech companies interested in building nuclear power plants.

If it’s solely to fuel the silicon fire that is contemporary machine learning it’s a harrowing concept.

If it’s to both do that, and power the grid, then doubly so.

The consolidation of power in these few tech companies is already at concerning levels before handing them control of municipal energy.

Nuclear and fossil are two alternatives, but renewables are a way to get rich while saving the planet.

More than one way to deal with night/winter too.

I highly recommend listening to this conversation with Jigar Shah, the head of the DOE's Loan Programs Office on this very subject. https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps

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