Agree. I haven't seen any examples of ChatGPT that might make me want to use it for my job. Yes if you are an inexperienced programmer (or just not very competent) then it might help you get something working I guess?
A couple of things I’ve found it useful for as a senior dev:
- Working with unfamiliar APIs which don’t have great documentation. It can be quite helpful for asking questions here, essentially taking the role of Google/StackOverflow, as long as the API was created before the knowledge cutoff and I guess as long as there’s enough content out there. It felt to me like it was able to do quite a good job of linking together the (rather terse) official docs with code from GitHub to show real world examples of how to do stuff. This was definitely net useful for me, but it does like to hallucinate APIs that should exist but don’t.
- Working with unfamiliar languages. I used it to help me write Rust recently (“how can I express this code more succinctly?”, “why won’t this compile?”) and it was quite useful, though I feel like you hit the limits of it if you get deeper into e.g. trying to find a workaround for a borrow checker situation and it’ll just make up code that doesn’t work.
Outside of that, I find it can be quite useful as a supplement to Google, and is good for writing things like regexes, but when I’ve tried doing more advanced coding tasks with GPT-4, I felt like I ended up spending more time trying to make the output compile and work (sometimes without success) than if I had just written it myself. It can be good for working out the broad outline of a solution though.
Overall, I find it a useful tool but I am sceptical of people claiming a 5x increase in productivity thanks to GPT.
tomduncalf|2 years ago
- Working with unfamiliar APIs which don’t have great documentation. It can be quite helpful for asking questions here, essentially taking the role of Google/StackOverflow, as long as the API was created before the knowledge cutoff and I guess as long as there’s enough content out there. It felt to me like it was able to do quite a good job of linking together the (rather terse) official docs with code from GitHub to show real world examples of how to do stuff. This was definitely net useful for me, but it does like to hallucinate APIs that should exist but don’t.
- Working with unfamiliar languages. I used it to help me write Rust recently (“how can I express this code more succinctly?”, “why won’t this compile?”) and it was quite useful, though I feel like you hit the limits of it if you get deeper into e.g. trying to find a workaround for a borrow checker situation and it’ll just make up code that doesn’t work.
Outside of that, I find it can be quite useful as a supplement to Google, and is good for writing things like regexes, but when I’ve tried doing more advanced coding tasks with GPT-4, I felt like I ended up spending more time trying to make the output compile and work (sometimes without success) than if I had just written it myself. It can be good for working out the broad outline of a solution though.
Overall, I find it a useful tool but I am sceptical of people claiming a 5x increase in productivity thanks to GPT.