3 ms·

If you have tolerance for mistakes, it can generate first drafts extremely quickly, freeing up your time to debug them. If you give up after seeing an error, it

by gowld 4y ago

If you have tolerance for mistakes, it can generate first drafts extremely quickly, freeing up your time to debug them. If you give up after seeing an error, it won't work for you.

omnicognate 4y ago
"Automating the tedious job of writing bugs so you can get on with the important business of investigating them," was a way I jokingly described the value proposition of AI coding assistants to colleagues in the early days of Copilot. It's amusing to see it stated unironically here.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  I feel similarly to the parent. It gives me a good rough first draft of the code I need, and since I'm using statically typed languages, the errors are generally pretty minor (not giving the right type annotations for example) that it still saves me a lot of time overall from writing everything from scratch.
- gowld 4y ago
  As a mere mortal, I often write my own bugs, so I'm happy for a machine to write them for me so I can move on to the next step.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Whether it saves time or not really depends on the task. The other day, I had a subtitles file with slightly mismatched timestamps. GPT wrote me a Python script to fix them that got 90% of the way there (and, in particular, the code had all the API calls that I needed to get it to 100%, even though this is the first time I've heard of the library it used). The whole thing took less time than finding and installing the app that would do it for me. The catch is that you need to have a pretty good "gut feel" understanding of its limitations to figure out whether it's going to be a time saver or not before you sink too much time into making it do something right. But it is a skill that can be learned from experience (for a particular model, anyway), and I suspect that the ability to decide what to delegate and what to do yourself will be one of the key differences between junior and senior devs going forward.
spookthesunset 4y ago
Agree. I’ve used it to help set up Bonjoir working across my home VPN. It wrote my the commands for EdgeOS but it kept insisting on adding commands that didn’t exist for my hardware version. I kept telling it “no that doesn’t work on my router” and it apologized and wrote the exact same thing again. The good news is 80% of what it spat out was usable. I gave up getting it to try to give me the last 20% and figured it out myself. One thing I’ve found helpful in those cases it to tell it that it doesn’t know what it’s talking about and ask it for good keywords to search on Google. Someday I’d love if it just gave me the relevant links itself…

by gowld 4y ago

If you have tolerance for mistakes, it can generate first drafts extremely quickly, freeing up your time to debug them. If you give up after seeing an error, it won't work for you.

omnicognate 4y ago

"Automating the tedious job of writing bugs so you can get on with the important business of investigating them," was a way I jokingly described the value proposition of AI coding assistants to colleagues in the early days of Copilot. It's amusing to see it stated unironically here.

satvikpendem 4y ago
I feel similarly to the parent. It gives me a good rough first draft of the code I need, and since I'm using statically typed languages, the errors are generally pretty minor (not giving the right type annotations for example) that it still saves me a lot of time overall from writing everything from scratch.
gowld 4y ago
As a mere mortal, I often write my own bugs, so I'm happy for a machine to write them for me so I can move on to the next step.
int_19h 4y ago
Whether it saves time or not really depends on the task. The other day, I had a subtitles file with slightly mismatched timestamps. GPT wrote me a Python script to fix them that got 90% of the way there (and, in particular, the code had all the API calls that I needed to get it to 100%, even though this is the first time I've heard of the library it used). The whole thing took less time than finding and installing the app that would do it for me. The catch is that you need to have a pretty good "gut feel" understanding of its limitations to figure out whether it's going to be a time saver or not before you sink too much time into making it do something right. But it is a skill that can be learned from experience (for a particular model, anyway), and I suspect that the ability to decide what to delegate and what to do yourself will be one of the key differences between junior and senior devs going forward.

spookthesunset 4y ago

Agree. I’ve used it to help set up Bonjoir working across my home VPN. It wrote my the commands for EdgeOS but it kept insisting on adding commands that didn’t exist for my hardware version. I kept telling it “no that doesn’t work on my router” and it apologized and wrote the exact same thing again. The good news is 80% of what it spat out was usable. I gave up getting it to try to give me the last 20% and figured it out myself. One thing I’ve found helpful in those cases it to tell it that it doesn’t know what it’s talking about and ask it for good keywords to search on Google. Someday I’d love if it just gave me the relevant links itself…