Why are we in the fallacy that we assume this tech is going to be stagnant? At the current moment it does very low tier coding but the idea we are even having a conversation about a computer even having the possibility of writing code for itself (not in a machine learning way at least) was mere science fiction just a year ago.
And even in its current state it is far more useful than just generating “hello world.” I’m a professional programmer and although my workplace is currently frantically forbidding ChatGPT usage until the lawyers figure out what this all means I’m finding it invaluable for whatever projects I’m doing at home.
Not because it’s a great programmer, but because it’ll quickly hammer out a script to do whatever menial task I happen to need done at any given moment. I could do that myself but I’d have to go look up new APIs, type it out, such a chore. Instead I just tell ChatGPT “please write me a python script to go through every .xml file in a directory tree and do <whatever>” and boom, there it is. It may have a bug or two but fixing those is way faster than writing it all myself.
I have the same job and my company opened the floodgates on AI recently. So far it’s been assistive tools, but I can see the writing on the wall. These tools will be able to do much more given enough context.
I’ve gotten it to give boiler plate for converting one library to another for certain embedded protocols for different platforms. It creates entry level code, but nothing that’s too hard to clean up or to get the gist of how a library works.
Exactly my experience as well. Seeing CoPilot suggestions often feels like magic. Far from perfect, sure, but it’s essentially a very context “aware” snippet generator. It’s essentially code completion ++.
I have the feeling that people who laugh about this and downplay it either haven’t worked with it and/or are simply stubborn and don’t want to deal with new technology. Basically the same kind of people who, when IDEs with code completion came to be, laughed at it and proclaimed only vim and emacs users to be true programmers.
It takes some figuring out but it’s been amazing for spreadsheets, I’ll explain what I’m trying to do as if I were explaining it to a person and it’ll give me a huge script that does exactly what I want, with annotations and everything. It has enabled me to do things that I don’t have the knowledge to do and saved me a ton of time. For example, I had a really complicated formula, vlookup, hlookup, arrays, it was a monster of a formula that took me seriously like 12 hours to get working. With GPT, a few years and one pandemic later, I’d forgotten how I did it, so I tested gpt with it. 2 hours. It was frustrating, there were a lot of "nope"s and "got this error"s but it did it so much faster than I could have iterated on it, and that was only 3.5. GPT 4 is way better at that, I can do other stuff just as complex as that with the 25 reply tokens I have.
That’s just one thing it’s good for, now that plugins are a thing it can use Wolfram Alpha and actually do math (don’t even try without that plugin). As a cook I might have a recipe that calls for a liter of soy sauce, but I only have 3/8l, I can just take a picture of the recipe on my phone, pull the text out with ocr, then I have a saved chat where I give it recipes with “adjust this for only 3/8l soy sauce” and it just gives me an updated recipe. I could pull up a note in my phone, multi-window a calculator, and do the math myself, but like why? It’s actually a pretty useful tool, at least for what I use it for.
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Why are we in the fallacy that we assume this tech is going to be stagnant? At the current moment it does very low tier coding but the idea we are even having a conversation about a computer even having the possibility of writing code for itself (not in a machine learning way at least) was mere science fiction just a year ago.
And even in its current state it is far more useful than just generating “hello world.” I’m a professional programmer and although my workplace is currently frantically forbidding ChatGPT usage until the lawyers figure out what this all means I’m finding it invaluable for whatever projects I’m doing at home.
Not because it’s a great programmer, but because it’ll quickly hammer out a script to do whatever menial task I happen to need done at any given moment. I could do that myself but I’d have to go look up new APIs, type it out, such a chore. Instead I just tell ChatGPT “please write me a python script to go through every .xml file in a directory tree and do <whatever>” and boom, there it is. It may have a bug or two but fixing those is way faster than writing it all myself.
I have the same job and my company opened the floodgates on AI recently. So far it’s been assistive tools, but I can see the writing on the wall. These tools will be able to do much more given enough context.
deleted by creator
I’ve gotten it to give boiler plate for converting one library to another for certain embedded protocols for different platforms. It creates entry level code, but nothing that’s too hard to clean up or to get the gist of how a library works.
Exactly my experience as well. Seeing CoPilot suggestions often feels like magic. Far from perfect, sure, but it’s essentially a very context “aware” snippet generator. It’s essentially code completion ++.
I have the feeling that people who laugh about this and downplay it either haven’t worked with it and/or are simply stubborn and don’t want to deal with new technology. Basically the same kind of people who, when IDEs with code completion came to be, laughed at it and proclaimed only vim and emacs users to be true programmers.
It takes some figuring out but it’s been amazing for spreadsheets, I’ll explain what I’m trying to do as if I were explaining it to a person and it’ll give me a huge script that does exactly what I want, with annotations and everything. It has enabled me to do things that I don’t have the knowledge to do and saved me a ton of time. For example, I had a really complicated formula, vlookup, hlookup, arrays, it was a monster of a formula that took me seriously like 12 hours to get working. With GPT, a few years and one pandemic later, I’d forgotten how I did it, so I tested gpt with it. 2 hours. It was frustrating, there were a lot of "nope"s and "got this error"s but it did it so much faster than I could have iterated on it, and that was only 3.5. GPT 4 is way better at that, I can do other stuff just as complex as that with the 25 reply tokens I have.
That’s just one thing it’s good for, now that plugins are a thing it can use Wolfram Alpha and actually do math (don’t even try without that plugin). As a cook I might have a recipe that calls for a liter of soy sauce, but I only have 3/8l, I can just take a picture of the recipe on my phone, pull the text out with ocr, then I have a saved chat where I give it recipes with “adjust this for only 3/8l soy sauce” and it just gives me an updated recipe. I could pull up a note in my phone, multi-window a calculator, and do the math myself, but like why? It’s actually a pretty useful tool, at least for what I use it for.