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I started skimming the article and just gave up. Why not just learn to program it yourself? Why are you wasting your time trying to get chatGPT to give you the

I started skimming the article and just gave up. Why not just learn to program it yourself? Why are you wasting your time trying to get chatGPT to give you the right thing? Most of the time you spent learning prompt engineering you could have spent on your actual problem. EDIT: removed the hot take for peace.

majormajor 4y ago
The particular example in the article is ambitious - it's definitely not the way I would use it right now. It's currently at the stage where it's as tedious to do that than to do it from scratch, and mostly requires the same knowledge. But there are other areas where things really shine. Complex SQL is the biggest one I've found. It's often intricate, tedious, and annoying, but usually not too terribly hard to review/read/QA (at least for read queries!). GPT turning plain language into SQL and knowing about fancy SQL capabilities that I normally have to fully google the syntax for every time I use anyway is a wonderful way of reducing friction. There's probably no shortage of other tasks like that, though some of the more potentially-destructive ones of them (dealing with Terraform, say) that I find similarly tedious probably deserve a lot more detailed review before trusting the output.
mmcclure 4y ago
I watched an extremely senior engineer do a talk last night on his experience trying to just run through an exercise of getting ChatGPT to build the kind of tool he's built many times over his career. The takeaway at the end was: ChatGPT is more useful for very senior developers. Knowing how to structure your question, what to ask for, what you don't want, actually lead to helpful collaboration with ChatGPT. Where it totally goes off the rails is when you ask broad questions, it doesn't work, then ChatGPT just starts throwing answers against the wall (try this, try that). I get the derision towards "learning prompt engineering," and generally agree, but in this case I think you could also argue that it's understanding (through experience) how to structure thought and questions in the same way you would going into the problem on your own. I've come around to seeing that interaction with ChatGPT as a useful exercise in and of itself.
- dpflan 4y ago
  Indeed, the more expert the more one can get out of these LLMs. Curation of the content and questions is critical so the better one is at that, the more useful this kind of quasi-expert system is.
vidarh 4y ago
Because the point of this article is to gelp people learn to use GPT productively because it's something you're likely to useany times. You might as well ask why bother learning your editor. Given the small number of steps this does not look like a waste of time to me at all even if starting from the point of view of being unaware of how best to prompt it, but with some basic understandibg of the approach, most of the time you can do better.

majormajor 4y ago

The particular example in the article is ambitious - it's definitely not the way I would use it right now. It's currently at the stage where it's as tedious to do that than to do it from scratch, and mostly requires the same knowledge. But there are other areas where things really shine. Complex SQL is the biggest one I've found. It's often intricate, tedious, and annoying, but usually not too terribly hard to review/read/QA (at least for read queries!). GPT turning plain language into SQL and knowing about fancy SQL capabilities that I normally have to fully google the syntax for every time I use anyway is a wonderful way of reducing friction. There's probably no shortage of other tasks like that, though some of the more potentially-destructive ones of them (dealing with Terraform, say) that I find similarly tedious probably deserve a lot more detailed review before trusting the output.

mmcclure 4y ago

I watched an extremely senior engineer do a talk last night on his experience trying to just run through an exercise of getting ChatGPT to build the kind of tool he's built many times over his career. The takeaway at the end was: ChatGPT is more useful for very senior developers. Knowing how to structure your question, what to ask for, what you don't want, actually lead to helpful collaboration with ChatGPT. Where it totally goes off the rails is when you ask broad questions, it doesn't work, then ChatGPT just starts throwing answers against the wall (try this, try that). I get the derision towards "learning prompt engineering," and generally agree, but in this case I think you could also argue that it's understanding (through experience) how to structure thought and questions in the same way you would going into the problem on your own. I've come around to seeing that interaction with ChatGPT as a useful exercise in and of itself.

dpflan 4y ago
Indeed, the more expert the more one can get out of these LLMs. Curation of the content and questions is critical so the better one is at that, the more useful this kind of quasi-expert system is.

vidarh 4y ago

Because the point of this article is to gelp people learn to use GPT productively because it's something you're likely to useany times. You might as well ask why bother learning your editor. Given the small number of steps this does not look like a waste of time to me at all even if starting from the point of view of being unaware of how best to prompt it, but with some basic understandibg of the approach, most of the time you can do better.