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God help us if people start trying to use an overconfident chatbot to replace documentation :(.

by saurik 4y ago

roel_v 4y ago
Maybe. To be fair, I had the same opinion yesterday. This morning I decided to take a real look at how I could use chatgpt to augment my programming, and once I started with it with an open mind, I now think it's going to take away much of the drudgery I have come to loathe so much about programming. I used to like delving into libraries and frameworks and learning all their details - I thought that was what 'learning about programming' was. Now, 20 years later, I hate those aspects with a passion - having to look up the idiosyncrasies of a function call again, because there are dozens of ways of using it but all slightly different, or piecing together another dull specific use case. This morning I had chatgpt generate 4 fully fledged functions for me, each doing a highly specific task that would have taken maybe 20 or 30 minutes each to piece together the specific API's, and one of them using a Python package I had never used before, didn't know of and would have had to read the getting started tutorial before I could have used it on my own. Then all I had to do was write the glue to call those functions in the right order and with the right arguments and boom that was it. Plus the code was more elaborate and coherent than it would have been had I have to do it manually. One example is not a guarantee, but the experience made my day, and probably my week. Which is why the pop_back() thing made me worry :)
- Someone 4y ago
  > This morning I had chatgpt generate 4 fully fledged functions for me, each doing a highly specific task that would have taken maybe 20 or 30 minutes each to piece together the specific API's, and one of them using a Python package I had never used before, didn't know of and would have had to read the getting started tutorial before I could have used it on my own. Then all I had to do was write the glue to call those functions in the right order and with the right arguments and boom that was it. “Boom that was it” _if_ you blindly trust ChatGPT to generate correct code. If you don’t (and IMO you shouldn’t), “it worked for me today” isn’t sufficient to decide whether you can trust it. You should go to the documentation of that package, judge whether ChatGPT used it correctly (and yes, that involves looking up the idiosyncrasies of function calls), judge whether you trust that package, evaluate its license, etc.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Can it also generate unit tests for you to prove the functions work as expected? Obviously those unit tests need to be something a quick glance at will confirm are actually usefully verifying expected behaviour (of course, there are circumstances that's nigh on impossible to do even with the most carefully handcrafted tests).
- nspattak 4y ago
  Amen.
drewcoo 4y ago
Chatbot moves in mysterious ways.
saagarjha 4y ago
I mean it's fine if you can double-check what it tells you quickly, it's just pretty bad with something like C++ because when it gives you something wrong the program may or may not tell you about it. For example, what it might be good for is "what are the parameters to this 6-argument function that plots a rectangle on the screen", because that's something you can confirm really easily and there are no real consequences to getting it wrong. On the other hand, someone sent me a screenshot of how ChatGPT was really helpful in figuring out how reader-writer locks work, and it told them "you can use pthread_rwlock_trywrlock to upgrade a reader lock to a writer lock" :/
JulianMorrison 4y ago
They're using it to replace "search on stack overflow, cut and paste, does it work?"
bigbillheck 4y ago
> if * when
hobs 4y ago
https://supabase.com/blog/chatgpt-supabase-docs https://supabase.com/blog/chatgpt-supabase-docs Already on HN
- williamcotton 4y ago
  The technique they’re using is much less error prone due to the nature of the prompt. When a prompt is “analytic” in nature, that is contains the facts required for the output, like “convert this following box score into an entertaining account of the baseball game it describes”, it works rather well. When the prompt is “synthetic” in nature, when it doesn’t have the facts in the prompt, like “based on that same box score, provide some direct quotes from the broadcasters”, it does not reliably provide factual responses.
taneq 4y ago
Doesn't see any worse than asking HN. :P
simplotek 4y ago
> God help us if people start trying to use an overconfident chatbot to replace documentation :(. A chat bot looks like a great help to parse through huge volumes of documentation. If the chatbot built around the docs outputs garbage, that is a telltale sign that the documentation was garbage to start with. Just because people started developing clever chatbots that misfire, let's not fool ourselves into believing documentation was a solved problem and all docs were squeaky clean.
- ziml77 4y ago
  Poor output from a chat bot indicating poor documentation would make sense if the chat bot could limit itself to authoritative information from the documentation, but that's not how these models operate. I'm not even sure how you could make them work that way because if you trained them solely on the documentation, they wouldn't be able to operate in a conversational manner.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    You can tune ChatGPT with custom data.
    - saurik 4y ago
      This is, AFAIK, not a task for fine tuning--which is more like trying to get a certain kind of style-but maybe a task for "semantic search". I watched this video a few days ago, and at least vaguely recommend it: https://youtu.be/9qq6HTr7Ocw https://youtu.be/9qq6HTr7Ocw
- imtringued 4y ago
  Here is the documentation that you consider unclear >If the container is not empty, the function never throws exceptions (no-throw guarantee). Otherwise, it causes undefined behavior. ChatGPT failed at basic regurgitation.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
That would very much be the Warhammer 40k machine spirit - the operator would only do what they can to appease it, and even the spirit wouldn't know how or why something did or didn't work.

God help us if people start trying to use an overconfident chatbot to replace documentation :(.

by saurik 4y ago

God help us if people start trying to use an overconfident chatbot to replace documentation :(.

Maybe. To be fair, I had the same opinion yesterday. This morning I decided to take a real look at how I could use chatgpt to augment my programming, and once I started with it with an open mind, I now think it's going to take away much of the drudgery I have come to loathe so much about programming. I used to like delving into libraries and frameworks and learning all their details - I thought that was what 'learning about programming' was. Now, 20 years later, I hate those aspects with a passion - having to look up the idiosyncrasies of a function call again, because there are dozens of ways of using it but all slightly different, or piecing together another dull specific use case. This morning I had chatgpt generate 4 fully fledged functions for me, each doing a highly specific task that would have taken maybe 20 or 30 minutes each to piece together the specific API's, and one of them using a Python package I had never used before, didn't know of and would have had to read the getting started tutorial before I could have used it on my own. Then all I had to do was write the glue to call those functions in the right order and with the right arguments and boom that was it. Plus the code was more elaborate and coherent than it would have been had I have to do it manually. One example is not a guarantee, but the experience made my day, and probably my week. Which is why the pop_back() thing made me worry :)

Someone 4y ago
> This morning I had chatgpt generate 4 fully fledged functions for me, each doing a highly specific task that would have taken maybe 20 or 30 minutes each to piece together the specific API's, and one of them using a Python package I had never used before, didn't know of and would have had to read the getting started tutorial before I could have used it on my own. Then all I had to do was write the glue to call those functions in the right order and with the right arguments and boom that was it. “Boom that was it” _if_ you blindly trust ChatGPT to generate correct code. If you don’t (and IMO you shouldn’t), “it worked for me today” isn’t sufficient to decide whether you can trust it. You should go to the documentation of that package, judge whether ChatGPT used it correctly (and yes, that involves looking up the idiosyncrasies of function calls), judge whether you trust that package, evaluate its license, etc.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Can it also generate unit tests for you to prove the functions work as expected? Obviously those unit tests need to be something a quick glance at will confirm are actually usefully verifying expected behaviour (of course, there are circumstances that's nigh on impossible to do even with the most carefully handcrafted tests).
nspattak 4y ago
Amen.

drewcoo 4y ago

Chatbot moves in mysterious ways.

saagarjha 4y ago

I mean it's fine if you can double-check what it tells you quickly, it's just pretty bad with something like C++ because when it gives you something wrong the program may or may not tell you about it. For example, what it might be good for is "what are the parameters to this 6-argument function that plots a rectangle on the screen", because that's something you can confirm really easily and there are no real consequences to getting it wrong. On the other hand, someone sent me a screenshot of how ChatGPT was really helpful in figuring out how reader-writer locks work, and it told them "you can use pthread_rwlock_trywrlock to upgrade a reader lock to a writer lock" :/

JulianMorrison 4y ago

They're using it to replace "search on stack overflow, cut and paste, does it work?"

bigbillheck 4y ago

> if * when

hobs 4y ago

https://supabase.com/blog/chatgpt-supabase-docs https://supabase.com/blog/chatgpt-supabase-docs Already on HN

williamcotton 4y ago
The technique they’re using is much less error prone due to the nature of the prompt. When a prompt is “analytic” in nature, that is contains the facts required for the output, like “convert this following box score into an entertaining account of the baseball game it describes”, it works rather well. When the prompt is “synthetic” in nature, when it doesn’t have the facts in the prompt, like “based on that same box score, provide some direct quotes from the broadcasters”, it does not reliably provide factual responses.

taneq 4y ago

Doesn't see any worse than asking HN. :P

simplotek 4y ago

> God help us if people start trying to use an overconfident chatbot to replace documentation :(. A chat bot looks like a great help to parse through huge volumes of documentation. If the chatbot built around the docs outputs garbage, that is a telltale sign that the documentation was garbage to start with. Just because people started developing clever chatbots that misfire, let's not fool ourselves into believing documentation was a solved problem and all docs were squeaky clean.

ziml77 4y ago
Poor output from a chat bot indicating poor documentation would make sense if the chat bot could limit itself to authoritative information from the documentation, but that's not how these models operate. I'm not even sure how you could make them work that way because if you trained them solely on the documentation, they wouldn't be able to operate in a conversational manner.
- imtringued 4y ago
  You can tune ChatGPT with custom data.
  - saurik 4y ago
    This is, AFAIK, not a task for fine tuning--which is more like trying to get a certain kind of style-but maybe a task for "semantic search". I watched this video a few days ago, and at least vaguely recommend it: https://youtu.be/9qq6HTr7Ocw https://youtu.be/9qq6HTr7Ocw
imtringued 4y ago
Here is the documentation that you consider unclear >If the container is not empty, the function never throws exceptions (no-throw guarantee). Otherwise, it causes undefined behavior. ChatGPT failed at basic regurgitation.
- tialaramex 4y ago

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago

That would very much be the Warhammer 40k machine spirit - the operator would only do what they can to appease it, and even the spirit wouldn't know how or why something did or didn't work.