[lowlevel]

I watched one of the new hires burn 8 hours in chatGPT trying to make excel do something that took me five minutes. Not worried for anything but the economy and the environment.

[tenzing]

Exactly this. In their current state, ChatGPT (and Claude, etc) are a great boost for people who already have good foundational knowledge.

They'll probably speed up learning in general, but are no replacement for an in-depth understanding.

[btreecat]

While I have seen similar (engineer struggle to get claud to write some TF that could have been done in a few min) I also have experienced the opposite.

I was attempting to put together some basic statistics for my oncall shift, so I downloaded the CSV from our system and used DuckDB to inspect. I had never used DuckDB before so using an LLM to help me refine my queries was great. Even with a few turds of a reply it still mostly helped save time.

Knowing when to stop and try a different approach is the same underlying skill that some devs don't exercise and others do.

[lifestyleguru]

It's the same as using Google search instead of programming skills, then Stack Overflow instead of programming skills, and in the meantime there was also WYSIWYG programming.

[rsynnott]

> and in the meantime there was also WYSIWYG programming.

Oh, that one's perennial; it periodically shows up, promising to obsolete programmers, and has since the 1980s.

[bamboozled]

I think it's great if you know what you want it to do and you prompt appropriately. Can save quite a lot of time if you already have some experience.

[MarcelOlsz]

I saw a guy on twitter boasting about launching some micro saas with 28,000+ prompts and doing "no coding". I'd pay to see that codebase.

[gregoryl]

Well, if they are somehow successful at raising funds, there will be some mean contracts available to un-fuck it :)