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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

I think they definitely add some value. For example, I haven’t written complex sql queries since I was in school 20 years ago. Recently Claude helped me write a recursive database query which did an in-database graph traversal. It would have taken me way more time to relearn how to do that from scratch.

But I don’t think many people are that worried about gpt4. We’re worried about what it’ll look like with 5-10 more years of progress. O3 is apparently already better than 99% of competition programmers or something - it just costs thousands of dollars of compute per query. But give them a few short years.

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On the other hand one could argue that you should understand the code you write. A super complex in-database graph traversal should probably be properly understood in case performance problems pop up. Or the problem itself should be broken down differently.

Once Claude gave me the query, I read it, asked questions about how it works and asked about potential changes. “Why is this bit here? Couldn’t we do it like this instead?” And so on. We went through about 5 variants of the same query, Claude and I. They didn’t all work.

I’m still no expert. But I have a lot more confidence in that query & how it works than I would have from cobbling something together from stackoverflow.

Complex SQL and regex are pretty much my only current use cases for it. Saves tons of time doing things you don't do every day so rusty, but still can tell whether it's doing what you were asking for.

It's basically a replacement for Stack Overflow, made possible by scraping Stack Overflow.

Yes, I think this is the major factor to consider. If it’s only the cost that’s stopping it from replacing real people, then it’s a matter of a few to max several years to be more than cost effective.

I’ll believe what they say about O3 when it starts seeing use in the wild.

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