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I’ve started using it as a sort of “shotgun approach” - characterize what you want without trying too hard, let it toss out a jumble of interesting snippets tha
by progrus 4y ago
I’ve started using it as a sort of “shotgun approach” - characterize what you want without trying too hard, let it toss out a jumble of interesting snippets that are often very good leads, and then take over refactoring from there.
I do agree that others who don’t understand what it’s doing may not even review the code output, and I predict that this will cause at least one death in the next ten years.
- musha68k 4y ago*weeks/*months
- progrus 4y agoFacts, sadly.
- bodge5000 4y agoI suppose it depends what specifically you're getting it to do, but I've found in my testing the shotgun approach to be more work than just writing it out myself. Honestly I've found its biggest value in learning a new language, it outputs with so many errors that it forces me to get in deep with debugging it. I haven't tried gpt-4 yet though, maybe its a vast improvement, I'm just not using it enough to justify the costs
- progrus 4y agoIt really depends on how comfortable you are with the language you’re using, and how recently you switched contexts. For anything unfamiliar, it’s pretty impressive how much it can help. In fact, I bet if you did an experiment comparing people reading a textbook about a somewhat-familiar language, vs. just asking GPT to do things and noticing the bugs, the latter group would reach proficiency faster.
- squeaky-clean 4y agoIt's just way easier for me to edit some existing code than it is for me to write it from scratch. Especially if it's incorrect (a la XKCD 386). For stuff where I'm not sure where to start it's been very helpful. Even though I often keep very little of the GPT generated code by the time I'm done.