Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

I’m going a new graduate starting an internship. It’s imperative that I do well to receive a return offer. In job search, I’ve built projects with Chat GPTs help. I didn’t tell gpt to just build me a project and I copy and paste but I genuinely use it as a “Jarvis” like Tony stark. That said, is there any stigma with using ChatGPT in the workplace? I don’t like to use gpt to code for me. I like to use gpt as an imaginary person who collaborates on projects. For example, I ask questions like, “I want to implement feature x. It should be used like this… my plan to implement this is to do a, b, and c. Is my structure a good and professional solution to this implementation?”

Usually, I get a really helpful and insightful response that optimizes my design. Sometimes I come up with a solution that might work, but gpt helps me come up with a better solution. This ends up teaching me so much because I actually absorb the information. Moreover, it helps me debug too. I find it as a shortcut to debugging. I see it as, I can spend 2-3 hours googling stuff, or I can spend about 45 minutes talking to gpt to pin point the bug and come up with a viable solution. All that said, what are your thoughts? Am I too reliant on it? Is this a “healthy” relationship with AI? I want to be a strong engineer. I don’t want to pick up sloppy habits and become a poor engineer. My perception of gpt is it’s a new resource to take advantage of. I need some input. What are your thoughts? Thanks!

> is there any stigma with using ChatGPT in the workplace?

Any? Sure. At the organization level, there are workplaces that completely ban ChatGPT and will fire you for using it, and there are workplaces that buy all their engineers a subscription to it and actively encourage using it. At the individual level, there are people who make heavy use of it, people who can't stand it, and (most commonly, imo) people who have nothing against it but don't personally find it very useful.

Don't use it if your company bans it, but otherwise do whatever you want and maybe check with your coworkers about how they feel towards it before revealing to them that you're using it, just to be safe.

> Am I too reliant on it? Is this a “healthy” relationship with AI?

Based on what you've said, your relationship with it seems perfectly fine. The concern with coding AIs is that novice programmers will encounter a problem they can't solve on their own, ask an AI to solve it for them, and copy and paste the output without understanding the problem or the solution. In the best case, the code can work but have subtle flaws that won't show up until later. In the worst case, the code doesn't even make sense and you annoy your peers by making them review zero-effort garbage.

But if you're just using it to further explore the solution-space of a problem that you already know how to solve in at least one sensible way, there's no danger there and you're just learning and improving. Just be sure to fully understand any AI solution you encounter before internalizing it as a lesson.

If we froze all coding AIs right now and prevented them from continuing to improve, I'd think you'd find them becoming less and less useful to you as you gain experience. Obviously, they do much better solving common problems with lots and lots of public solutions already available, and more senior engineers don't tend to need help with those or have much to learn about them. That being said, I know plenty of very capable senior engineers who use AIs to generate repetitive boilerplate (often tests) in verbose/inexpressive languages like Go. Anyway, depending on how quickly these AIs continue to improve, you may never get the chance to "grow out of them" and they might be able to keep teaching you increasingly complex things until they finally replace all of us. Who knows!

It’s a tool for personal productivity, just like spreadsheets and python scripts. I use it as a super dictionary, to write text and code or just satisfy my curiosity. It’s useful when I am knowledgeable enough to verify the output. It’s a technology that augments my abilities, which is what technology should do.

But I never let it speak for me, and I find it rude to make someone take 5 minutes to read something I “wrote” in 5 seconds. Technology should make us better humans. It should amplify our best traits, and our ability for bullshitting isn’t one of them.

LLMs are too new, and too much in flux, to answer this question well. I can give an answer now, and in two months it might be obsolete. So all I can do is say something generic like:

It's a productivity tool that will find it's place alongside similar tools like intellisense and linting. Just like those tools it will change the way people code - they will need to hold less info in their mind, and that can potentially allow them to reach greater heights, or learn faster. Or, it could potentiate laziness instead. That's down to the individual (and applies to more than just coding, LLMs are equally used in fields like art, translation, marketing, copyrighting etc.).

As for my personal usage. Here's a couple of thoughts that might be obsolete in two months:

* It's awesome for looking up basic algorithms like sorts

* It's pretty great for doing simple things with well established code bases (e.g. React)

* It's even better for doing those things if you are already an expert so that you know how to guide it

* It's pretty terrible for doing anything with more obscure/recently released code bases, whether you are an expert or not

* I have heard it suggested this will make people want to avoid working with less well known libraries. This remains to be seen I guess

Thoughts on what this means in a "professional" career:

1. If your professional career brings you down well trodden paths (e.g. writing React apps) it will probably be a big part of your work

2. If your professional career leads you to working on obscure systems, or even writing those systems, it won't be as useful for you except as a reference for algorithms, or for writing comments (this is where I have been recently).

However, if someone can figure out how to retrain the models constantly on new info so that even the newest of releases becomes a part of the training data just as fast as they would show up on a Google search, that will change things a lot. Likewise, if it can be trained on a your own personal obscure codebase (I think this might already be possible?) that would be a big deal.

Finally, as for stigma. I don't think so. There are privacy issues but these can be worked around by running a local LLM and these are getting better and better. If you have a graphics card with 16gb of RAM I think there's already models that you can run locally that are similar to GPT3.5 performance.

Can you explain how you use it? Every time I try to use it for programming, the output is somewhat nonsensical. I also tried copilot but that was even worse (for terraform and python)