Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

Maybe I am just getting old but the idea of using a non-deterministic tool that can hardly be reasoned about that will straight up hallucinate facts for any professional work sounds insane to me.

Yes, I do see the value for Junior Devs as I am sure it can drastically increase their output in the short term but aren't they shooting themselves in the leg in the long run? That might sound elitist but at the end of the day, you will need to learn to read technical documentation anyway and once you understand it there is no need for ChatGPT.

Yes, if you are constantly hopping from one framework of the month to the next big thing, you just don't have the time to learn anything in depth and then again ChatGPT can help. But do you really want to live like this? Instead of band aid solutions we might want to push for less hype-driven and more pragmatic development styles that allow us the time to learn our frameworks.

You mean other than the fact that it costs money?

80% of the time, the suggestions are either too generic for our codebase and so has to be patched up with our variable names, methods, etc. About half the time it completely misses the mark/intent of what is being written, and offers an auto-complete for a different problem.

20% of the time, it actually acts like a full line or full section autocomplete. Areas I've found it particularly helpful are writing tests. For example I added a new integration yesterday that touched a bunch of interface files for those integrations. Copilot was able to pick up on that and auto-generate a 90% functional test with ~30 lines, including setup and assertions.

I'm not convinced it's saving me time yet since I have to correct it/ignore it most of the time. When it works, it's cool. And like another comment said, typing speed has never been a bottleneck for me (record of 155 wpm on typing tests, I probably sit around 120-130 for average day-to-day typing).

It's good at generating simple things that are 60% to 100% correct.

It's good at summarizing high level concepts or summarizing how multiple high level concepts relate with 60% to 100% accuracy

It's ok at helping you think about things to troubleshoot when you have an error you're not sure to do with.

To be honest I would say it's actually not going to be good for junior devs because they don't have the skills to properly fact check, quickly. But for more senior folks it's very easy to immediately see what's wrong, ignore those parts or ask it for clarification, and use what's right.

If you mostly know what you're doing, it can be very helpful to get immediate feedback, niche examples targeted exactly to what you're working on, or summaries of whatever high level concept you need a little more clarification on.

Much much faster than spelunking through Google.

As a concrete example I just this morning had it summarize Python's asyncio Queues versus Tasks, what they are, a few examples of using them, and when you would want to use one versus the other. All in just a few minutes.