18 ms·
Chatgpt has been pretty transformative to my programming, probably surpassing the only other thing coming close of really leveraging powerful ides like IntelliJ
by larve 4y ago
Chatgpt has been pretty transformative to my programming, probably surpassing the only other thing coming close of really leveraging powerful ides like IntelliJ. It can generate all the scaffolding I need by just inputting a couple of sketches of Plantuml or even just markdown lists. I can build tools, unit tests, test data, fuzz harnesses, admin uis, dashboards, all within a few hours. I can transform a couple of words into very legible documentation. If you seed it with just a couple of lines of your own code and setup, it’s able to usually build stuff that matches the style of the codebase. It’s broken and wrong 80% of the time, but in a way that I can fix within a few minutes.
This leaves me with 4h of high quality thinking and programming time instead of 1. It means I can try out 3 different approaches with full tooling instead of 1. It means I can build a whole terraform for aws and gcp and bare iron in 30 minutes.
The fact that I can build solid tools and a full slurry of unit tests and end up with 4x time in my day is just blowing my mind. The quality of my software has tremendously gone up despite using something that mostly outputs broken code.
- sbrother 4y agoMay I ask how you're getting ChatGPT to be reliable enough as a service to get these results? I had a similar experience the first week, but now most times I try it is overloaded and inaccessible, and when it's not the hourly rate limiter makes it difficult to be very productive.
- marcosdumay 4y agoWhen I read that kinds of comments I always immediately wonder what people are writing that needs so much scaffolding. And then I remember my workplace's official architecture... that made my team a huge success case by refusing to follow it. Of those things you listed that you use it on, only test data need to take some non-trivial amount of time.
- larve 4y agoI work in e-commerce/retail. So it’s things like: - storybook stories to cover all cases of ui configuration - tooling to create reports/import/export of different csv formats - api endpoints, validating incoming data, instrumentation for monitoring - every action and error gets logged as an event for auditing Overall the part of the codebase that is not some kind of scaffolding is like, computing taxes on an order item or something like that. The rest is just shuffling data around and ensuring it is tracked and validated properly. It’s tempting to be clever and devise a killer tool that allows you to write a single data declaration and derive all the rest but that rarely survives an encounter with the real world.
- sanderjd 4y agoI would love to see a screencast of this kind of workflow. Honestly I can't quite imagine what it looks like.