Comment by the_jeremy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_jeremy | Hacker News Reader

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> * Utterly useless to people who have no clue what they're doing

I disagree.

I'm making a board game of 6 colors of hexes, and I wanted to be able to easily edit the board. The first time around, I used a screenshot of a bunch of hexagons and used paint to color them (tedious, ugly, not transparent, poor quality). This time, I asked ChatGPT to make an SVG of the board and then make a JS script so that clicking on a hex could cycle through the colors. Easier, way higher quality, adjustable size, clean, transparent.

It would've taken me hours to learn and set that up for myself, but ChatGPT did it in 10min with some back and forth. I've made one SVG in my life before this, and never written any DOM-based JS scripts.

Yes, it's a toy example, but you don't have to knwo what you're doing to get useful things from AI.

> but ChatGPT did it in 10min with some back and forth

You might be underestimating the expertise you applied in these 10 minutes. I know I often do.

> it's a toy example

This technology does exceptionally well on toy examples, I think because there are much fewer constraints on acceptable output than ‘real’ examples.

> you don't have to knwo what you're doing to get useful things from AI

You do need to know what is useful though, which can be a surprisingly high bar.

Yeah you clearly don't have "no clue" of what you're doing in this example though.

You're someone who knows the difference between a PNG and an SVG, knows enough Javascript to know that "DOM-based" JS is a thing, and has presumably previously worked in software/IT.

You're smart enough to know things, and you're also smart enough to know there's a lot that you don't know.

That's a far cry from the way a lot of laypeople, college kids, and fully nontechnical people try to use LLMs.

It seems to me then you then did not learn what you would otherwise have learned, and so did not improve receive the critical thinking and general halo of knowledge improvements which come with learning.

You sound at least somewhat experienced. You knew you wanted an SVG and that Javascript could be inserted into it. That's a pretty reasonable design starting point.

I agree AI is not "utterly useless", but its usefulness is extremely limited. If it writes all of the code for you, it tends to get into unmaintainable states very quickly, requiring manual review or guidance to overcome.

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