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For coding, I've been using it like Stack Overflow. It really decreases my barrier to doing work because I can ask lazy follow-up questions. For example, I migh
by barbarr 4y ago
For coding, I've been using it like Stack Overflow. It really decreases my barrier to doing work because I can ask lazy follow-up questions. For example, I might start out by asking it a question about a problem with Pandas like "How do I select rows of a dataframe where a column of lists of strings contains a string?". After that, GPT realizes I'm talking about Pandas, and I'm allowed to ask lazy prompts like "how delete column" and still get replies about Pandas.
I also use it for creative tasks - for example I asked it for pros and cons of my cover letter and iterated to improve it. I also used it to come up with ideas for lesson plans, draft emails, and overcome writer's block.
GPT has drastically lowered the emotional-resistance barrier to doing creative tasks and improved the quality of my output by giving me creative ideas to work with.
- Shocka1 4y agoSame here for Stack Overflow. My Google searching for generic CS stuff I tend to forget has pretty much come to a halt.
- carlmr 4y agoSo on my coding problems I haven't had much luck. It doesn't seem to know Bazel, the Rust code I asked about was completely hallucinated, but it did solve a problem with Azure DevOps I had. I think if the training set did not contain enough of something it can't really think of a solution. What is really nice though it's as you say the refinement of questions. Sometimes it's hard to think of the right query, maybe you're missing the words to express yourself, and to chatGPT you can say yes, but not quite.
- menacingly 4y agoMy experience is almost completely the opposite. My likelihood to dive into something new is significantly higher now. It might help to approach it from top down? Usually, if I'm asking a technical question, I want to apply my deeply understood principles to a new set of implementation details, and it has amplified the heck out of my speed at doing that. I'm kind of a difficult to please bastard, a relatively notorious meat grinder for interns and jr devs, and still I find myself turning to this non-deterministic frankenstein more and more.
- Thorentis 4y agoThis could mean the future goes one of the two ways. Engineers get lazy and converge on using only programming languages which AIs understand or have been trained on, or we forget about this waste of time and work on more important problems to solve in society other than the lack of an AI to be our crutch. Sadly, I think the former is more likely.
- lionkor 4y agoi think most people will just keep programming the way they do, and the AI hype will mostly die down. People have been saying that C++ is dead for decades, yet here I am writing code in it with a big community of others who do, too.
- anoy8888 4y agoI think this is the problem. When people talking about c++ is “dead” ,at that time they meant 70% people using to perhaps 5% . Just like we says after industrialization,making clothes by hand is dead . It is irrelevant that there are still some people making clothes by hand . When AI the main way to code and remove 90% of coding jobs. It is also irrelevant to state that there are still 10% people still coding
- libraryatnight 4y agoIt doesn't have to be job or career related to be relevant.
- HWR_14 4y agoWhen people say C++ is dead, they normally are looking at public repos and stack overflow questions. Fairly biased towards newer languages
- WalterSear 4y agoI'm using GPT to write C++ code for me. I've never worked in C++ before. It's going very well. I'll describe what a class is supposed to do. It spits out the class files, with the fiddly bits 'left as an exercise to the reader'. I then describe the fiddly methods separately, and it spits those out too. There's still work to be done, but anything boring is handed to me on a plate.
- yosito 4y agoYeah, I gave it a simple task of encoding a secret message in a sentence by using the first letter of every word. Hello = "Hey everyone, lick less onions". I worked with the prompts for over an hour to try to get it to complete the task, and while I did have some success, it really struggled to reason about the task or provide a valid response. If it can't even reason about a child's game, I can imagine it struggles with a programming language it has barely seen. I don't think it's actually reasoning about things at all, just providing a statistically plausible response to prompts.
- tripdout 4y agoI'm not sure, but I got it to work great on my first try with the following prompt: ------ Your task is to encode a secret word by making a sentence where each word starts with a letter in the secret word in order. For example, encoding the secret word 'bag' could produce the sentence 'bagels are green'. Encode the following secret word: 'pen' ------ People eat noodles. ------ Worked for window, backpack as well, although I did have to tell it not to use the secret word in its encoding when I got to backpack, and then to follow the same order and not repeat words after a few attempts.
- andsoitis 4y ago> I don't think it's actually reasoning about things at all, just providing a statistically plausible response to prompts. It turns out that humanity’s problem might not be that AIs can think but rather that humans believe that AIs can think. One might even go so far as to say there’s a real danger that we hallucinate that AIs can think, to our detriment.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jamespwilliams 4y agoWe don’t actually know what “thinking” is, though, so I’m not sure it’s possible to say “this model can’t think”.
- sharperguy 4y agoI've found that it's much worse for languages like rust than it is for things like typescript and python. The thing AI seems to be really great at is writing boilerplate code like argument parsing for CLI tools.
- vertis 4y agoLess boilerplate writing is fine by me.
- jhonof 4y agoI actually have found it significantly worse at python than typescript, I think it's the indentation for scope vs. explicit brackets that screws it up (at least in my experience).
- jjeaff 4y agoI wonder if that is simply due to orders of magnitude less training data for rust code. Python and JavaScript are ubiquitous. While rust is 7 years old and makes up less than 2% of the code on GitHub.
- Marcan 4y agoThank you for your well written response. I found it informative as I'm also currently exploring ways to leverage ChatGPT in my daily workflow. I also found it interesting that your answer kind of mirrors the writing style of ChatGPT, especially at the end there. I'm not saying you used it to write that response by the way, just that it may become more and more common for people to adopt this style the more ChatGPT's usage is widespread.
- Volrath89 4y agoI suppose it was part of the "joke", but YOUR answer is the one written in ChatGPT style, not OP. I was thinking that maybe in the near future it will be "better" to write with a couple of mistakes here and there just to prove your humanity. Like the common "loose" instead of "lose" mistake, it will be like a stamp proving that you are a human writing.
- redeux 4y agoI love this thought. Smart people will just instruct ChatGPT to make some mistakes here and there in their prompt. When I use ChatGPT I typically use a couple sentences describing how I want it to sound, which makes it less bland and probably harder to detect, but I don’t care about the latter part as much. Totally agree that the poster above seems Kaufmanesque.
- dceddia 4y agoI was just thinking this morning about how one day, probably soon, we’ll have people reminiscing about how they miss seeing typos in writing.
- swader999 4y agoI do that when I write grants for my sports club and it seems to get better results than peers that hire pros to apply for them.
- toomanyrichies 4y agoYou joke, but I hope this doesn’t come to pass. The world does not need more people writing “noone” instead of “no one”, “would of” instead of “would have”, etc.
- bitcoinmoney 4y agoDo you run your own customized model or just chat GPT?
- barbarr 4y agoJust ChatGPT.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoExactly how I’m using it as well. It’s absolutely incredible as a coding productivity tool.
- alchemist1e9 4y agoSame here and GPT-4 was definitely a noticeable improvement.
- roflyear 4y agoYou know, I thought so but then recently I asked it to code me a function to do a financial calc and it just didn't get there at all. It gave me code but it was really poor and didn't do close to what I wanted. But when I gave it my code it did generate useful data for unit tests. So that's pretty cool.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoI’ve found that whenever it gets something really wrong, it’s either corrected by a follow up prompt (telling it that its wrong helps), or rephrasing the question.
- roflyear 4y agoNope, not my experience - unless it's a trivial problem. In my experience it almost always gets stuck in a loop where it's rotating between two or more incorrect implementations. It isn't doing iteration - it's just looping. Even if I point out the problem directly, it will just say "sorry, you're right - here's the correction!" and the correction has the same response from an earlier item that I pointed out had a problem!
- spaceman_2020 4y agoUsed to get that a lot with GPT-3.5. But GPT-4 has been more reliable if you rephrase your prompt.
- ericpauley 4y agoGPT/Codex is truly the pandas master. Much of my productivity boost from using these tools has just been not having to sift through pandas docs or SO.
- dmarchand90 4y agoI find it is like having a brilliant intern that is not super consistent in taking their antipsychotic medication
- ted_bunny 4y agoAh yes, a Bing Chat user.
- oars 4y ago> I find it is like having a brilliant intern that is not super consistent in taking their antipsychotic medication This is fantastic.
- dmarchand90 4y agoI asked gpt4 if it could guess what I was talking about: "It seems that you are referencing an AI language model like ChatGPT, which is developed by OpenAI. These AI models can provide useful information and perform tasks like an intern, but they might not always be consistent or accurate in their responses, similar to someone not taking their antipsychotic medication consistently. It's important to remember that AI models like ChatGPT are not perfect and can sometimes produce unintended or nonsensical outputs." GPT3 had no clue
- Zuiii 4y agoThis statement nicely describes my experience with LLMs. They may have a hard time staying on topic (especially with larger untuned models like LLaMA 13B+), but if you help them stay on track, they become very useful.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago> "How do I select rows of a dataframe where a column of lists of strings contains a string?" Literally just googled that and the first result: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53342715/pandas-dataframe-select-rows-where-a-list-column-contains-any-of-a-list-of-strin https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53342715/pandas-datafram... You're not using it like Stack Overflow. It's actually regurgitating Stack Overflow, except with errors hallucinated in.
- HDMI_Cable 4y agoEven with that caveat, using GPT in this way is still useful. The amount of time spent to simply ask GPT-4 is a lot lower than to search StackOverflow, and while this problem is so basic that the first result often works, once one gets into complex problems that massively benefit from input context, I think GPT-4 would save massive amounts of time.
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoSince you're gonna have to search Stackoverflow anyway to verify that ChatGPT didn't hallucinate garbage, I'm very dubious that it actually saves any time, let alone "massive" amounts of it.
- namlem 4y agoJust ask it to write unit tests for you and run the code to see if it's garbage. Faster than trying to verify by looking through the sources
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoSo... use the garbage-generating AI to generate garbage unit tests to see if its other garbage code checks out? Sounds like a vortex of stupidity.
- flyval 4y agoHave you actually tried it yourself? I’d recommend it. And I don’t mean just playing with it —- Try using it to help you build something. It’s much more efficient than googling and combing through stackoverflow. Hallucinations are not as common as you’re thinking. You clearly can’t just take the code, paste it in, and trust that it works, but you shouldn’t be doing that with stackoverflow either.
- TheHumanist 4y agoIt's saved my ass this week coming up with coding exercises for a course me and some folks are working on. Has been a rough week. Depression flaring up. Creates a real mental barrier at times. GPT has helped a lot. I still will do the code myself and all that. Just came up with the written out ideas for exercises which really got me over the hump. It's incredible how helpful that was.
- toastal 4y agoI'm a bit concerned about this as previously we'd build communities in chat but now the chat is just with the bot. Not wasting folks' time is great, but you'll miss out on the social parts by not asking around the IRC, Matrix room, or MUC.
- readonthegoapp 4y agocan you get at least one snarky, a-holish response along with the useful info to really give you that authentic SO feel?