Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 114 posts

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#71

Post by mym1990 »

agentcoops wrote: post #21

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…

And with computers there was a divide between those willing to learn to program and those using the applications that were programmed...whats your point? The majority of society needs a pretty big level of abstraction to be willing to use something.

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#72

Post by throwaway4aday »

glau wrote: post #51
cardanome wrote: post #34

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…

Personally, I’M terrified of people using ChatGPT for serious coding work. They will be seeding the future with vulnerable/buggy software that no one understands. Granted, us humans are doing that now. Just many orders of magnitude slower. Probably slow enough that we can find/fix the important stuff. The other aspect that terrifies me is the potential for nation state entities with deep pockets to inject vulnerabili…

LLMs are also capable of analyzing, describing, and debugging software. There have been several papers published on this. So I wouldn't worry too much about any new buggy software being produced. In a few years, LLMs will probably be issuing PRs on your repos to fix things you haven't gotten around to or noticed yet.

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#74

Post by agentcoops »

Swizec wrote: post #60
endisneigh wrote: post #31

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.

> When these things can understand the business requirements I’ve been looking into this. Nothing definitive yet, but my hunch is that current LLM’s struggle because they lack curiosity. They will answer your question, however vague, with the first most obvious answer they can think of. This is great, if you’re a junior team member. Super talented, very eager. But a more senior engineer approaches the problem differe…

I think you’re still anthropomorphizing LLMs too much by saying the problem is a lack of curiosity. It’s an engineering problem: you haven’t figured out the correct “context” from which business requirements would follow. (And why Microsoft is so incredibly well positioned for the future)

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#75

Post by mym1990 »

glau wrote: post #51
cardanome wrote: post #34

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…

Personally, I’M terrified of people using ChatGPT for serious coding work. They will be seeding the future with vulnerable/buggy software that no one understands. Granted, us humans are doing that now. Just many orders of magnitude slower. Probably slow enough that we can find/fix the important stuff. The other aspect that terrifies me is the potential for nation state entities with deep pockets to inject vulnerabili…

Are you able to back up the claim that ChatGPT code, when refined and deployed to production, is more buggy than code that is patchworked together by 10-20 stack overflow posts until something sticks?

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#76

Post by _ea1k »

cardanome wrote: post #34

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've found the opposite to be true, actually. I'd prefer it in the hands of someone more experienced.

Real world example: Hey chatgpt, write me some Camel routes to take an input off of a JMS queue, wire it up to the camel salesforce getSObject endpoint, use these headers for the lookup, and write some unit tests.

Actual result: Code that is 99% correct, but messed up a couple of parameters and used a slightly wrong approach to mocking some things in the unit test. Having used all of the frameworks extensively, it took ~5 minutes to fix and certainly saved time. Partially because I'm used to reviewing code from people who make similar mistakes.

I can't imagine that working out as well if it was a truly junior engineer (not just a junior in name only) who didn't understand what was going on with the code very well.

And this is just the beginning. It is hard to imagine not using this for the bulk of the work within a few years.

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#77

Post by unshavedyak »

naiv wrote: post #63
endisneigh wrote: post #31

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'?

A lot of people think GPT4 got worse with a semi-recent change. Worse as measured by intelligence or accuracy on complex inputs. Most notably i think the change was around the time they significantly increased the speed of GPT4.

I don't have much opinion on this though, i just know i see that description of GPT4 a lot. I use GPT4 daily, but i think i don't really challenge it most days, as i've never trusted it enough to do so hah.

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#78

Post by pydry »

Swizec wrote: post #60
endisneigh wrote: post #31

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.

> When these things can understand the business requirements I’ve been looking into this. Nothing definitive yet, but my hunch is that current LLM’s struggle because they lack curiosity. They will answer your question, however vague, with the first most obvious answer they can think of. This is great, if you’re a junior team member. Super talented, very eager. But a more senior engineer approaches the problem differe…

Whatever it is it goes beyond curiosity - it doesnt just come up with the laziest answer it often invents it.

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#79

Post by Swizec »

agentcoops wrote: post #74
Swizec wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When these things can understand the business requirements I’ve been looking into this. Nothing definitive yet, but my hunch is that current LLM’s struggle because they lack curiosity. They will answer your question, however vague, with the first most obvious answer they can think of. This is great, if you’re a junior team member. Super talented, very eager. But a more senior engineer approaches the problem differe…

I think you’re still anthropomorphizing LLMs too much by saying the problem is a lack of curiosity. It’s an engineering problem: you haven’t figured out the correct “context” from which business requirements would follow. (And why Microsoft is so incredibly well positioned for the future)

Curiosity is how you build that context.

Re: Tips for better coding with ChatGPT

#80

Post by Jeff_Brown »

agentcoops wrote: post #21

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…

> now infinitely more productive

How much more productive do you feel you are coding with an LLM? As another HN user said, to me it's like a talking dog -- incredible yet useless.

Post reply on HN