4 ms·

I think programming is very easy most of the time, most time I spend is just typing/moving code around, figuring out the solution is the easy part for me, only

I think programming is very easy most of the time, most time I spend is just typing/moving code around, figuring out the solution is the easy part for me, only the computer<>brain coordination is slowing me down most of the time. But there are things that are harder for me, or more complex maybe. I struggle with math, and always had, so anything involving heavy math or algorithms is harder for me (I'm a hacker, not a computer scientist, if you will). For these things, I found GPT4 to be very helpful. I can write what I want, get a WIP version back, work out some kinks with it myself and ask it to rewrite it if it's not perfect, until I have a perfect version. Add some unit tests, find more things that are missing/wrong (sometimes), more back and forward. Before GPT4 I either just tried to work around having to deal with heavy math, or find people IRL that could help me. Now I'm a lot faster even if it involves math, because of GPT4.

whateveracct 4y ago
So you write the unit tests yourself to confirm the code you say you can't understand is correct? That's an interesting approach. But you'd probably need more tests than usual to gain confidence, so you are losing efficiency there (although the ceiling-raising nature of it is interesting). What happens in production when there's a bug in the complex code you punted to GPT? How do you debug?
- capableweb 4y ago
  Basically. I'm not sure I'm losing much efficiency, my previous approach was contacting friends who know how to do math in programming, sometimes it could days before I could move past the issue. And the result is the same, ending up with a piece of code I mostly understand, but struggled to write myself so the knowledge is fleeting at best. Just to be clear, the context here is me writing games for fun, while struggling with the math heavy parts. I would never professionally use GPT4 for anything, and wouldn't push anything to production that I don't 100% understand, that would be failing at my profession and I take bigger pride in my work than that. But for fucking around with games in my free time, it has made me a lot of efficient at the parts I'm struggling with.
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    Has using it ended up teaching you anything? Like from reading the produced solutions?
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Yes, for sure. Some applications of procedural texture primitives (like Perlin Noise) that I wasn't super familiar with and for example "quaternion" which I never heard about before trying to write a game.

whateveracct 4y ago

So you write the unit tests yourself to confirm the code you say you can't understand is correct? That's an interesting approach. But you'd probably need more tests than usual to gain confidence, so you are losing efficiency there (although the ceiling-raising nature of it is interesting). What happens in production when there's a bug in the complex code you punted to GPT? How do you debug?

capableweb 4y ago
Basically. I'm not sure I'm losing much efficiency, my previous approach was contacting friends who know how to do math in programming, sometimes it could days before I could move past the issue. And the result is the same, ending up with a piece of code I mostly understand, but struggled to write myself so the knowledge is fleeting at best. Just to be clear, the context here is me writing games for fun, while struggling with the math heavy parts. I would never professionally use GPT4 for anything, and wouldn't push anything to production that I don't 100% understand, that would be failing at my profession and I take bigger pride in my work than that. But for fucking around with games in my free time, it has made me a lot of efficient at the parts I'm struggling with.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  Has using it ended up teaching you anything? Like from reading the produced solutions?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Yes, for sure. Some applications of procedural texture primitives (like Perlin Noise) that I wasn't super familiar with and for example "quaternion" which I never heard about before trying to write a game.