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Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

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Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#62

I am absolutely disgusted by the idea of people using ChatGPT for serious coding work. 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…

Don't be. There are some use cases that fit very well. For example, we plan to use GPT-4 for generating text that ends up being seen and read by our customers. (Can't disclose the details, as it's near to core of our business model.) We need a _lot_ of text, and its in style that is time-consuming to think and write by hand. However, all the generated data is checked for correctness by humans. I think that these tips…

Yeah, I meant coding.

Text generation with human proofreading/editing is definitely a valid use case. Maybe not for top-tier prose but yeah if you need large amounts of decent quality text it is the way to go. Definitely makes some new business ideas viable.

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#63

I've used GPT-4 before it changed, and though impressive, writing code has never been the bottleneck for me personally. When these things can understand the business requirements and tell me what I should be building and why, with detailed sensible reasoning then I'll be hyped.

what do you mean with 'changed'?

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#64

Further evidence of my justified true belief that the world will rapidly divide between those who already had programmatic control over their computers, now infinitely more productive through direct access to the GPT APIs (to say nothing of the firms that will use LLMs only internally, trained on their own codebase for example) and those who believe GPT=ChatGPT, which will slowly become but another conduit for ads th…

Yes I think I have a similar sentiment. Articles like these would do better to take the approach of

"Oh shit, something huge is happening and we might not be intelligent enough to see the ramifications, but here's a humble attempt"

rather than

"Ha, the techies have done something they think is impressive again. It's certainly interesting, but as usual they're exaggerating it and failing to think from a nuanced human perspective. However us journalists are trained in that sort of thing, so we can help out here, and we know you readers will be all too familiar with the way those techies can only think like computers lol."

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#66

Further evidence of my justified true belief that the world will rapidly divide between those who already had programmatic control over their computers, now infinitely more productive through direct access to the GPT APIs (to say nothing of the firms that will use LLMs only internally, trained on their own codebase for example) and those who believe GPT=ChatGPT, which will slowly become but another conduit for ads th…

The second group is going to be using chat interfaces in every app whether they like it or not in under 2 years. I think it'll be a net benefit, boomers (and everyone else too) will finally get their wish of just telling the computer what to do.

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#67

I am absolutely disgusted by the idea of people using ChatGPT for serious coding work. 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…

Consider whether or not this is an ego driven reaction. Do you have the same feelings about your compiler? It also writes code that you likely don’t read, and likely don’t understand in depth.

A non-deterministic compiler would be pretty terrifying. In that case I would expect many people still writing assembly by hand for any serious work.

Yes, there is missing/unclear language specifications and compiler bugs and sometimes you get surprised by certain optimizations but you can reason about compilers well enough for practical purposes. Plus it's not economically viable anymore to do without them, sadly.

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#68

I am absolutely disgusted by the idea of people using ChatGPT for serious coding work. 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…

Strong "Just read the manual" vibes.

Just reading the manual would have saved me so many times when I was starting programming.

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#69
post #55

I'm trying to get it to write full-scale apps, via the APIs. Very difficult once you move past one file, but it's a challenge. The problem is that this tech isn't perfect, and can be unpredictable.

Same, it requires a phenomenal amount of tooling and prompt engineering but I'm sure it's possible. At least for relatively small text focused apps.

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#70
post #47

I am absolutely disgusted by the idea of people using ChatGPT for serious coding work. 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…

I don’t think it’s more insane than copying and pasting code from anywhere on the internet. You have to understand what you use and you must not trust it blindly, whatever the source.

Well, I don't copy and paste code from the internet either. It's fine for learning but at some point you should be able to write your own code from scratch.
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