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ChatGPT help me solve a refactoring bug today. I had spent hours messing around trying to figure out what the issue was until I realized, via asking ChatGPT, th
by impalallama 4y ago
ChatGPT help me solve a refactoring bug today. I had spent hours messing around trying to figure out what the issue was until I realized, via asking ChatGPT, that I had misunderstood a piece of the code and the docs. It was able to answer and provide examples (until it had error and crashed) in a way a senior engineer might have been able to.
The funny thing is I had tried just pasting in code and saying "find the bug" and it wasn't helpful at all, but when I posted in a portion and asked it to explain what the code was doing I was able to work backwards and solve the issue.
Its nice anecdote where the AI felt additive instead of existentially destructive which has been a overbearing anxiety for me this last month.
- ape4 4y agoThat works for a really small amount of code (like 100 lines).
- teddyh 4y agoSounds a lot like “rubber duck” debugging.
- oneoff786 4y agoIf you’re willing to overlook the small detail that it is the duck explaining to you how your code works rather than you explaining to the duck then sure
- teddyh 4y agoExcept that the duck is an unreliable confabulator, and will cheerfully make up plausible-sounding fake information when “explaining”.
- oneoff786 4y agoShrug. Precision seems like a low importance metric when suggesting interpretations of code for the purpose of debugging.
- teddyh 4y agoIt’s been said that the best way to get the correct answer from somebody is not to ask for it, but to instead give them an obviously incorrect answer. This annoys people enough for them to do the necessary research to come up with the correct answer, in order to prove the incorrect answer to be wrong. It might be that ChatGPT can be used to weaponize this tendency. Maybe Stack Overflow should have an automatic pinned answer from ChatGPT (clearly labeled as such) on all questions, in order to goad people into providing the actually correct answer?
- oneoff786 4y agoI feel the smugness in this post overlooks that fact that most of the time ChatGPT is going to be correct.
- teddyh 4y agohttps://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ The value of Stack Overflow must be that it can provide correct answers, and the model of SO hinges on the assumption that this can only be provided by humans. If SO discovers that this is not the case, then so be it.
- henry_bone 4y agoFrom Star Trek: First Contact: "When you build a machine to do a man's job, you take something away from the man." You surrendered the need to think to the machine. You are lesser for it. I don't think these AIs are just removing drudgery, like, say, a calculator. They actually do the work. Or more correctly, they produce something that will pass for the work. Wholesale embracing of this sort of technology is bad for us.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y agoMeh. I'd rather find out where it can take us. That sounds more fun and interesting.
- XorNot 4y agoDoes this mean pair programming makes you a worse engineer? Or even just "asking for a second opinion"?
- sli 4y agoI don't think other people count as "machines."
- imtringued 4y agoIf you do pair programming and the other person always does all the work, then yes.
- RhodesianHunter 4y agoThat sounds pretty Luddite to me. I don't think the average person wants to be doing the menial work, vs architecting a grander vision IE the purpose for the work.
- melagonster 4y agomany AI is designed for doing research, medical and writer work.
- Karunamon 4y ago
- hardwaresofton 4y agoWould you mind noting what language you were working in?
- impalallama 4y agoIt was a problem with my gitlab-ci config but I wasted a lot of time wondering if the problem was the scripting portion.